bengaluru a bengaluru firm with expertise in conversational artificial intelligence ai whose solution delivered last year is also being used by the indian armed forces on the western and eastern borders has now developed a new integrated speech recognitionbased solution that can help interpret crossborder intercepts along indias northern and northeastern bordersthe endtoend voice translation system developed by gnaniai uses automatic speech recognition asr machine translation and speechtotext to convert mandarin to english and is designed to help armed forces intelligence agencies and local law enforcement authorities in improving communication systems and giving substantial leeway to the defence forcesthe firm has used more than 8000 hours of audio data four major dialects of mandarin to train the machine and the firms cofounder and cto ananth nagaraj told toi the tool would transform and improve the communication systems and help strengthen armed forces the solution has a wide range of applications that includes cross border intelligence voice surveillance monitoring telephoneinternet conversations intercepting radiosatellite communication and to bridge interactions during border meetings and joint exercises the firm also said that their tool has features like noise reduction dialectaccent detection and support for all audio file formats we are in talks with the armed forces and as on date we are 100 confident of them accepting this given our previous success you will hear something from them in the next few months in 2019 we delivered on a significant contract for the armed forces and our solution is being used on the western and eastern borders this changed the game for them nagaraj saidhe said that earlier the armed forces which had intercepts from various sources used either manual analysis or keywordbased search technology gnanis solution used ai and provided a complete transcript of millions of records in a matter of hoursfor instance someone had to sit and listen to all the records to find keywords like aloo or gobi code for grenade they would have to listen to all of them and narrow down how many conversations had such keywords which was time consuming with our solution giving a complete transcript they can simply search nagaraj said nagaraj said the firm realised that the armed forces do not have enough expertise in mandarin compared to the languages used in pakistan bangladesh or nepal working with them armed forces we understood that in this case just giving a transcript was not enough as not many understand mandarin so we are offering a transcript in various mandarin dialects and a complete translation of the same in english he saidon the value of the 2019 contract nagaraj said im not at liberty to disclose that but i can say that it was significant we are a team of 50 ai people in bengaluru and the contract was worth enough to keep us all happy for a few years