Tanvir Hassan Sourov is a Tech Entrepreneur who has been working in the Startup Ecosystem for the last 8 years. He started his Company Technolive which later helped in forming Socian Ltd which is an Artificial Intelligence based Actionable Intelligence Company with his friend Tareq Al Muntasir. Tareq Al Muntasir is a Technology Enthusiast who has been working with Cutting Edge Technology for the last 7 years. They are currently working on speech technology through Socian which has transformed to a new entity, Decibel Ltd.

The Background Story

Two friends, Tanvir Sourov and Tareq Al Muntasir form Ahsanullah University of Science and Technology (AUST) started their startup journey through Technolive back in 2015. The company used to provide traditional services to local and global clients by offering different apps, websites, systems, software and other technological support. They participated and won the Telenor Digital Winner Best App in Asia in Bangladesh, BRAC-a-thon and numerous other competitions. And during the process, they got closed door mentorship from Startup Dhaka and few other Industry Experts for a good amount of time. From that time onward, they learned a lot and regarding how to run an organization, performing accordingly to make it grow. On August, 2016, Socian Ltd was formed and was a graduate of Grameenphone Accelerator Batch – 2.

Back then Socian was working on Sentiment analysis on Digital Contents. Sentiment analysis is the recognition of emotion from a sentence, analyzing its structure, whether the statement is positive, neutral or negative. Starting with this facility Socian first joined the world of Artificial Intelligence. Back in June 2017, they got another round of investment at a Valuation of Half Million USD. The investment required to make change in their service portfolio, getting into pure Artificial Intelligence based products and services. They worked on Voice Analysis, Computer Vision (Visual Analysis) and Textual Analysis domain. They were 1 of the 2 Big Data Companies of eFounders Fellowship Class 4 organized by UNCTAD and Alibaba Group (https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/38-asian-entrepreneurs-graduate-from-unctad-and-alibaba-business-school-s-efounders-fellowship-1027761817). The Company also holds lots of local and global awards into its portfolio. Most of the works of Socian Ltd was on Speech Technology. This technology includes conversion of speech to text, text to speech and other Voice related analytics. They prepared a solution to convert speech to text for Bengali which took more than a year. The product is available from 2019.

With the progress of their Voice Technology, Socian got another round of investment with a valuation of USD 5 million for their voice-based products. But the new Investment Terms required to form a New Company which only works with Voice Technology (All the Voice IPs and Products are being transferred in the New Company). The New company is called Decibel Ltd.

The New Era Begins

With the pure determination of enriching our mother language Bengali and eradicating poverty in the rural areas, Decibel Ltd. has started providing an interface to any company which wants to have an interactive voice interface in their website or app with Decibel’s API. There is a General API as well as customized APIs and services for Businesses based on their particular needs.

Suppose you want to use any ride sharing Platform, or buy any product from any Ecommerce Website. What if you would have just spoken your Destination name or the product you want to buy and the processes would have been done! Or the Website or App starts talking with you to make your journey much easier! Or think of a Voice Assistant who is always with you whenever you need any service, it interacts with you over Voice (An AI supporting your needs) understanding your preference. Imagine you get to know what is being talked by your Call Center Agents, what are your Customer’s Demand, Complain, Feedback – you get all of them in a Well-organized Dashboard. Or think of automating all of your call centers with AI, instead of human agents – how much beneficial it will be for your Business and how much you can actually increase your reach; Customers will call, their Voice Query will be analyzed, ChatBot will find relevant answers, the Answers will again be spoken to the Users in real time – wouldn’t that be really amazing! It would increase the reach of customers, increase efficiency and save a lot of money! All of this is possible and Decibel can give you all these services based on your Industry and particular requirements.

End user or ultimate beneficiary of this speech technologies will be the rural, illiterate people who cannot use smartphone properly, don’t have internet access (no internet or active internet) and face challenge to operate in any interface in English. Even some of them does not understand the interface well. So, it becomes very easy for them if the interface is in Bengali and they can communicate with voice in the interface and do their task through voice command. And most amazingly, the rural users can also use their Feature Phones to do all these operations in minimal time by calling a Short Code (App and Web based solutions are also available). And talking is way easier than typing and takes 5x – 10x lesser time!

Motto of Decibel Ltd. is to digitalize the illiterate people of the rural area of Bangladesh and increase the market reach in the whole country. People can buy talk time from the Telecom Operators and use the talk time for this operation at a very cheap rate.

Many of the companies around the world offers similar kind of technologies but none support Bengali to that extent in their interface which is the advantage of Decibel to capture the market in Bangladesh. There are many other languages besides Bengali that are not covered with the existing facilities. One key thing about the Artificial Intelligence and Analytics industry is that, the more usable data a Company has, the more enriched and developed the company’s system is. The pricing of their solution is customized based on the clients. It can be for per 300 minutes ranging from BDT 30 to BDT 150 based on the requirements. The concept can be described as volume licensing. The more usage a company has, the less the pricing gets. Decibel Ltd. is developing similar speech technologies for other languages too. Recently they had a POC and right now working on an agreement with a Telco of Myanmar for their product on Mobile Financial Service domain.

Decibel is working on empowering the Industry by offering their speech technologies to get loan information, customer details, recording every day’s transactions etc.

Marketing Strategy

Decibel will open its service offerings to different organizations. The website of Decibel can be accessed at www.decibel.com.bd. And the APIs can be accessed at developers.decibel.com.bd. The recent Investor of Decibel is also a Big Customer of Decibel and they will do a big part of Marketing and Branding for Decibel. At the same time, Decibel will follow both ATL and in some cases BTL marketing strategy to ensure awareness and users. Decibel is currently running an Initiative called Amar Bangla which is a campaign for Enriching Bangla language. There are many gifts such as Macbook Air, Samsung Galaxy S8 and others. Also, people will get Cashback in their bKash or Rocket Wallet for participating in this contest. People can just go to amarbangla.decibel.com.bd and use the Website or App to give their Voice Data. The process is very simple, Open the App, Read out the Bengali Sentence, Press Submit, Keep Repeating. There are different levels to make this process much more interactive.

Roadblocks

When the Company started their journey, Bangladesh market was not ready for the concept of Artificial Intelligence. Now we can say that finally Bangladesh is ready for AI. Many of the investors are also showing interest in this sector and actively investing for the research and development of these technologies. Global Investors were not much interested to enter into Bangladeshi market due to many obstacles. But now they are being interested! Local investors are not much tech oriented, and do not show any tendency to finance a new concept as they don’t have enough resources to understand the depth of the concepts. The Market still doesn’t have the proper realization of the value and blessings about artificial intelligence. They had to educate the market that there is something called AI and customer will get many facilities applying the AI solutions into their existing system. Manpower is the biggest challenge for AI industry because very few people are experienced with Industry Level AI. The curriculum that is taught in the Universities of Bangladesh are not enough and backdated in most of the cases. The knowledge base is not being developed among the freshers unless they self-learn.

But we cannot expect that a fresh graduate from university can work on Industry Level AI. So, the strategy we follow here is to train them and make them ready. Students can train themselves and make themselves ready for the actual projects. And anyone wants to do collaborative research with us, we have the facilities to make that happen as we are also doing several researches continuously. We always want to improve ourselves with the cutting-edge trends and technologies through these researches. Government should be much more approachable to the Startups, because in many cases, Startups have the necessary expertise for Executing things better, way better, but cannot get the government projects because the Company is not of 3 or 5 years and doesn’t have enough Liquid Asset. They should be more liberal to startups so that they can get the government project and demonstrate their capabilities.