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It cost Hexolabs’ 10-member team six months, and around Rs30-40 lakh
Style to create Mobile Antakshari
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The song sounds familiar, but the words are 0
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missing. The listener thinks for a minute, trying Like 3,869
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to fit lyrics to the tune; she decides to hazard a
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guess. Her voice quivers as she sings into her
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cellphone; then, suddenly, a smile spreads across her face. The words are right.
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Mukherjee puts number to slowdo
Finance minister sees economy expandin
at over 7.5%; Kaushik Basu expects
The prompt at the end of the line gives her a few seconds to recover before revival in the final quarter
launching into the next song. The exercise is repeated with redoubled
Coal ministry considers royalty sha
enthusiasm. It makes for an odd sight; it also seems to be immense fun. The change relates to the way benefits a
to be passed on to the local community
In the crowded world of mobile phone apps, Mobile Antakshari stands out. The miners
game, created by Hexolabs, a Chennai-based firm, is one of India’s most popular
2G scam | Delhi HC stays Chandoli
apps, having attracted 110,000 customers within the first three months of its
bail
launch in May 2009. Justice V.K. Shali took the view that
Chandolia’s release might have an “impa
Since then the app’s user base has been growing at 10% every quarter. And the on...
game is, clearly, addictive—approximately 40% of its players are repeat
K.P. Singh | Gurgaon was envisage
customers. Mobile Antakshari, says Vijay Shekhar Sharma, chairman of One97 as another Chandigarh
Communications, one of India’s largest mobile value-added services (VAS) Real estate baron K.P. Singh speaks abo
companies, is an “excellent incarnation of the game” and makes “optimum use of his dreams, property development and
DLF’s debt
resources”.
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2. 12/3/11 Music and lyrics - Technology - livemint.com
In a country where the Daniel Lalonde | Champagne wasn
Internet user base is always a bubbly
The president-CEO of Moët & Chandon sa
growing sluggishly, even as heritage is the brand’s strongest suit
the mobile user base has
exploded, mobile apps may
serve as the best bridge
between the two. “In rural
India, VAS and apps are fast
taking the space of the
Internet, access to which
remains limited,” Sharma
explains. “They’re easier to
use, and they’re often
Mass appeal: Raja Manohar, managing director of
available in vernacular
Hexolabs Interactive, which created Mobile
Antakshari, at his Chennai office. M. languages.” The success of
Lakshman/Mint Mobile Antakshari is only one
of the cases in point.
Incredible as it may sound, Mobile Antakshari happened largely by chance. It
wasn’t what Raja Manohar, Hexolabs’ managing director, had in mind when he
started his company in 2006, when he was still a student at the Indian Institute
of Technology, Kanpur. At the time, Manohar had been focusing on creating
educational apps, to help children spell or recognize prime numbers, for
example.
Those apps were successful, but only moderately; Manohar knew that he’d need
to create an app with a much wider appeal. What that would be, he wasn’t sure.
Then, one day, a maid working in the Hexolabs office asked Manohar what
exactly was it that his firm did. This woman, who had studied till class V, spoke
only a smattering of Tamil, and she needed her daughter’s help to make calls on
her cellphone.
Also Read The Future of the Internet (Complete Series)
That blunt question set off a train of thought in Manohar’s mind. “Her only
access to information seemed to be voice,” he says. “That’s when I realized that More videos
Sites to reach out to the bulk of people, I’d need to venture into voice-based services.”
Hindustan Times Most Read Most E-mailed Editor's Picks
Hindustan The choice, he claims, was narrow. Mass appeal in apps was limited to “astrology,
Online Classifieds Bollywood and cricket”. Astrology was not quite his area of expertise, and he That Eighties show
Fever 104 wasn’t clear what kind of cricket app he could create. Bollywood, though: that Discounts, new launches lift November
Shine: Jobs in India
might work. sales
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Manohar recalls that it took a 10-member team—graduates of IIT and the Flying in the face of profitability
National Institute of Design—5,500 lines of code, six months of work, and There’s more to a name than you know
“between R 30 lakh and R 40 lakh” to create the app. Jet’s patent challenge against Virgin
dismissed
The heart of the game—the very first stumbling block—was the automatic What St Stephen’s means to me
speech recognition (ASR) technology to decode the players’ voices. Licences for
these advanced technologies were prohibitively expensive, so Hexolabs tied up
with OnMobile to use one of its ASR technologies.
Next came the “exhausting and funny” process of creating a database of songs
for four languages—Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. Each language would
have 1,500 songs, every one of which needed to have a “grammar” written for it,
which would give the system points of comparison with what players were
singing.
The complexities only increased. “We’d noticed,” Manohar says, “that when
players weren’t sure of the song, they’d start in a wavering, slightly husky
voice.” The ASR would have to compensate for these vocal quirks. Then came the
testing, for which, says Manohar, “friends and a few freelancers” were roped in.
Mobile Antakshari can be played either against the computer or against friends.
In the former, a player is presented with four modes of play. All four modes
expect players to recognize a song and sing it back, although the clues in each
differ.
The mutliplayer mode, for “Antakshari Ustads”, allows players to key in the
telephone numbers of their friends, inviting them to join in. These friends-
turned-competitors now buzz in every time they recognize the song, to get first
shot at singing the lyrics. Winners redeem their points for prizes such as caller
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3. 12/3/11 Music and lyrics - Technology - livemint.com
tunes or more apps.
The work on Mobile Antakshari continues apace. Every quarter, around 100-150
new songs are added in each language. A massive back-end system logs every
single song a particular player has heard, so that songs aren’t repeated. The
system also logs language preferences: A player who plays in Hindi three times
is taken directly to the Hindi version the fourth time around.
The success of the app, however, hasn’t translated into financial returns, which
leaves Manohar a little bitter. “The irony in app development is that the creator
gets 10% of the revenue while everyone else, including mobile service providers,
get 90%,” he says. “There really isn’t very much money to be made from
content.”
Part of the problem, he thinks, is the fragmented nature of the Indian market.
“In countries like the US, where handset markets are a lot more homogenous,
it’s possible to survive by creating apps for phones like the iPhone,” he says. “But
here, we have to customize apps for a range of handsets, a time-consuming and
expensive process.”
Sharma agrees that the initial marketing for any app is tricky, especially for
small companies, but the initial struggle, he believes, will pay off.
The silver lining for Hexolabs is that two more domestic mobile operators will
soon offer Mobile Antakshari; operators in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Singapore
have also shown interest, although song copyrights make those tie-ups more
complicated.
Manohar is cautious, but he agrees that Mobile Antakshari was a great learning
experience. What kind of apps does Manohar see in the future? “I want to reach
out to rural markets directly through healthcare and educational apps,” he says.
It’s time, he thinks, to start singing a slightly different tune.
akshai.j@livemint.com
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Rahul7star
can i use my iphone to play this app
11 months ago Like Reply
!"#$ %&', A pundit of "Computer and Communications Futu…
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