Aligning Innovation With Mental Model Of Users

On the company’s relevance a decade from now: We are creating India’s own smartphone platform for the next billion smartphone users who will be on-boarded on the technology bandwagon over the next 10-15 years. Our hope is that other players in the tech ecosystem build their products on our platform to truly serve the needs of these users in ten years from now. The market will evolve and our technology will evolve, however, we will remain focused on continuously innovating from ground-up to meet the real needs of Indian consumers.

On the future of the business: In the smartphone industry, introducing a software-level differentiation will be key for smartphone brands to succeed in the Indian market as there is little or no differentiation in the market from a hardware standpoint; with smartphones from various brands now available at every price point. While the mid-price and the premium segment users would move for upgrades and replacements, a significant amount of growth will be driven by the first-time users of smartphone. These users will shift from feature phones or non-users (will start using smartphones) owing to the digital revolution in the country. To ease the learning curve of our users and to have them adapt to the smartphone era as soon as possible, smartphone technology will have to be delivered to them by thorough understanding of the contextual needs and the mental model of the user.

On the importance of AI and blockchain to the business: Any new technology until it becomes commonplace is ‘artificial intelligence’. In fact, there was a time when calculators when referred to as AI. Having said that, the latest advancements in machine learning and neural networks have opened doors for us to venture into fields such as natural language processing (NLP). This has allowed Indus OS to improve its speech and language related features such as text-to-speech, speech-to-text and translation/transliteration.