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Sometimes, a business idea can stare so blatantly in your face that you can do nothing but miss it. There must be a few hundred entrepreneurs, and even budding ones, who know this is true. That feeling will hit you when you see for the first time what Reverie Language Technologies Pvt. Ltd. has to offer.

Bengaluru-based Reverie is the brainchild of two brothers, Arvind and Vivekanand Pani and S.K. Mohanty who, we are told, is possibly the father of Indian language fonts. More on that later. To explain Reverie’s work without putting into perspective the problem they are solving is perhaps not doing justice to potentially one of the most innovative startups to come out of our version of the Silicon Valley.

Vivekanand, who is the technology evangelist and CTO for Reverie, gives out the first bit of information connected to his startup. Did we know, he asks, that it takes 42 clicks on a multilanguage-enabled Nokia phone to type the word Hindustan in Hindi, and about 18 in English? We did not.
What Reverie does, explains Arvind, Head, Strategy & Business Development, is provide a multiple language framework for digital platforms that can include mobile phones, PCs, tablets etc. This framework will not only allow for rendering multiple languages on such devices for text display, but also for text entry and other value adds such as contextual conversion of languages dynamically. “We are fixing the major problems multilingual users face in this country of not being able to read and write in their language effectively and easily across digital devices,” he says.

For now, the founders are fully focusing only on the mobile phone. In a demonstration shown by the three one afternoon in Bengaluru on a branded ‘multilingual phone,’ it became quite apparent what is the basic problem mobile users face when trying to communicate via any Indic language.
For one, as Vivekanand points out, the usability aspect of such phones is deceptively low. The fonts are extremely hazy and nowhere as clear as printed text would be in the same language. Secondly, typing a simple word in any language other than English would give you sore fingers.

Mohanty, who is type design head at Reverie, explains that the biggest issue between languages in Latin, and languages that follow the Indic and similar non-Latin scripts is that the latter are not linear like the former. These are complex scripts that are very difficult to display and work with.

Reverie’s offering, according to Vivekanand, fixes this problem for good. Using the company’s proprietary product, an user could read text in all Indic languages, key in text in them, and even convert one language to another. “What we have done is standardized an entire range of complex scripts and designed types for digital devices of all ranges, screen sizes, and resolutions,” he adds.

He shows another branded regular phone, this time with the Reverie solution and the experience was instantly much better. Not surprisingly, the clarity of text on the phone was extremely good. As good as the rendering of English characters. Apart from the display, Reverie’s text-input product delivered an equally compelling user experience.

Reverie’s solution works on two levels. First is, of course, the straight method of entering text in the user’s native language using the virtual or physical keyboard, whichever Reverie is powering. Second, and this is much more interesting, is the phonetic text entry: this is a novel method not much heard of in this space. What that means is that you could type a word in Punjabi and Reverie’s solution would transliterate that into text in any other language.

So, if you typed the word Vadhaaiyan in Punjabi, Reverie’s product would transliterate that into its Hindi equivalent. And this works across almost all 22 Indic languages including Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Assamese, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada.

This development will open up a whole new market for handset maker, telecom VAS and mobile apps in the country, it seems. Would a driver buy a phone that lets him type in Kannada and lets his Gujarati boss receive that message in Gujarati? And vice versa. What of operators delivering text based VAS and enabling user-generated content in 22 Indian languages? The opportunity is hard not to spot. In fact, it is too big to be able to put a number on it. After all, India has 1.2 billion people, and only about .1 billion have the understanding of English. And to address this market, Reverie’s products deliver a user experience of high efficiency even in sub-Rs.2,250 devices.

Predictably, the founders are moving fast to grab this opportunity that they saw first and are best equipped to take on. Already, Arvind says, a few device makers, and VAS providers are in various stages of discussions. However, he requests that the names be kept under wraps for the time being.

As a team, it would be perhaps impossible to get one as good as the one behind Reverie for the kind of work they are doing. Vivekanand has about 14 years of experience in Indian language computing, having led the language tools and technologies initiative at Graphics- and Intelligence-based Script Technology, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).

His brother Arvind, though an engineer by trade, has spent 10-odd years in managerial roles at companies like Intel, John Deere and SAIL.
The lynchpin of the team, though, is Mohanty who has over 25 years of experience in developing Indic and South Asian scripts. He founded and headed the font design, script and glyph standardization activities at C-DAC for 10 years.

Indic fonts developed by him can today be seen across the print media, TV channels, official communications and general hoardings almost everywhere in the country. Yes, he could well be called the father of Indian language fonts. Self-funded for now, Reverie is not content with just the Indian market, Arvind says. “We have our eyes set on the global market with support for 50 languages addressing all major Perso-Arabic, Cyrillic, CJK [Chinese/Japanese/Korean], Latin and South-Asian languages as well.” They already have presence in the U.S. and Greater China regions.

“As a product, we expect Reverie’s offering to reach every country that does not have Latin as its base script and where there is a more complex native script. Our opportunity is global,” says Vivekanand. That is true, whichever language you may want to say it in.

Text Talk
• Started in: 2009
• Initial Investment: Not disclosed
• Source of Funds: 100 percent self-funded
• Annual Revenue: Not disclosed
• Break Even: 2012 expected
• Manpower: 10
• Offices in: India, U.S.A., Taiwan

©Entrepreneur April 2011

Tags:
Arvind Pani, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, font, language, multilingual, Reverie Language Technologies, S.K. Mohanty, Script Technology, Vivekanand Pani