Cloud telephony startup Exotel has set up a research division to spur innovation in the voice space. Called Exotel Labs, the division will have a team of researchers specialising in machine learning, data mining and signal processing. “Voice communication is at the core of most businesses in India,” said Siddharth Ramesh, CTO at Exotel.

“Exotel Labs is our research division, which will focus on an innovative approach to solving problems in the voice space.”

The lab will comprise three components — tie-ups with leading universities, focused long-term hackathons or events where people solve a given problem by various means, both software and hardware.

Exotel sets up research division to spur innovation in voice space

“The immediate road map is to work on call quality problems. There are a whole bunch of problems — noise, abrupt disconnections, silence, echo issues and all. The later problems are more machine learning and data mining centric, which is an in-house team, and foidentifying patterns from calls and seeing which route is better, which is not,” said Ramesh.

The startup has roped in Balaraman Lakshmanan, founder of video editing and sharing startup Crispify, as a research software development engineer. “Balaraman, our first hire, brings with him a lot of years of experience from his stint at Crispify and Aricent.

Source: The Economic Times