The ‘birth’ of RML

Chatting over a cup of tea on a winter (by season and not necessarily by the weather) afternoon at a friend’s place, trying to figure what we could do for a ‘living’(none of us were in the corporate world at that time) we received a call from another friend who was enjoying his winter afternoon at Pune.

Having caught-up with each others’ lives he brought up the subject of marketing an application which could do transliteration from English to a bunch of vernacular languages. The application also had the capability to read out the English text. Moreover, it could run on smart-phones (Android-based), desktops, laptops or tablets as well. He asked us if we would be interested in marketing such a product as it could be used by people to learn English on their own.

The two of us here in Kolkata were discussing getting into the training market, but mostly on the technology and tools related to Information Management. We were thinking Big Data, Hadoop, Data Mining, Machine Learning and such. This was a new thing and we needed time to think about it. However, we requested for a couple of demo licenses that we could use to explore the application in our ‘free’ time.

We met up again after a few days. During this time each of us did make time to explore the features of the application. However, we felt that it lacked certain capabilities to be used as a learning tool for spoken English. But, we realised, that if the capabilities were incorporated, then this could become the tool of choice for anyone and everyone who wanted to learn or improve their spoken English.

A few more calls and face to face discussions with the Product team (luckily they were based in Kolkata) and the features that we wanted – Personal Content, speech-to-text, etc. were incorporated into the product. The application (RML-Learn English) was now ‘ready’ to be used as a self-learning tool for developing spoken English capability.