Even ten years ago, if someone ever saw you talking to a machine, they had one word for you -- lunatic, or other variants of this word, depending on your choice of regional dialect. Today, things have changed. Millennials are uber comfortable talking into and hearing back from a machine, and if the non-millennials do not catch up, they are going to be called lunatics the next time they ask directions from a human being!Voice assistants, from day one, had massive potential, from changing web surfing behaviour to making voice the virtual keyboard to all the information in the world. A major step was taken a few days back in India, to kick-start the next wave of voice-enabled computing. Amazon India, at its Voxcon event, revealed that Alexa will now understand and speak in Hindi!

With this development, Alexa now becomes that virtual Salwar-clad all-knowing, ever-responsive girl who can now converse with millions of middle-class Indian households. From typical activities like playing music to dimming lights, the powers of Alexa can now be leveraged to turn up family soaps, get Ramayan or Quran recitations, and become the central family compute device for entertainment and information. On one hand, mass adoption of Hindi voice computing opens up huge opportunities for rural computing at the grassroots, and on the other, allows brands to build an application with Hindi voice at the centre pillar.Global IoT brand Tuya Smart envisions a smart home where every device talks (literally) to each other.

The company has created a solution where a small piece of hardware can be plugged into anything from a fan or an AC or a TV or even a washing machine, to make it voice-ready. Tuya takes care of the entire back end mesh of connectivity formats and standards, giving the manufacture an affordable option to smarten socks machine Manufacturers their electronic devices, and the consumer, more devices that listen to you.On the software side of things, there are companies like Agrahyah Technologies that voice-enables companies that already have non-voice websites or apps. From car comparisons to mutual fund plans, this Indian company has voice-enabled over 100 brands and hopes to grow massively in the coming months. And then we have companies like Hungama, that have unlocked unique insights on Indian consumers of digital entertainment, and are looking at voice to give them a platform for growth.

Unlike the rest of the world, music is categorized in India, not by the singer, but the actor that has acted in the song, and Hungama has voice-enabled results to suit this global deviation just for India. The company also believes that entertainment video consumption is at an all-time high in India and Hindi voice will only grow it further.Alexa behn now has an Indian visa and can speak Hindi fluently. Between her and her sisters at Apple and Google, the threesome is ready to rock India with Hindi. Next step: regional languages. Lets wait to see which sister jumps on to that bandwagon!--IndiaTechOnline

Machine learning algorithms gather knowledge at an oversize scale, consolidate this knowledge and establish patterns during this knowledge from its own disposition history. Based on these patterns it judges whether a borrower is credit worthy or not and regulate the process of loan decisioning engine. So AI may help you make credit decisions at scale but it is Machine Learning that helps you improve your algorithms and ensure that you are one step ahead of the industry in understanding credit and market patterns. There are few platforms which offer help in credit analysis. CoinTribeCoinTribe is a leading online loan disbursement platform that provides quick and easy collateral-free loans to small businesses and individuals.

It is the only online lending platform which has back-tested its credit model with large banks. The marketplace model facilitates loan origination and credit assessment through CoinTribe before it is shared with the banks. PaaS enables banks and NBFCs to utilize CoinTribe’s platform for effective risk analysis and recommendations to digitally underwrite their own consumers. CoinTribe’s PaaS is equipping lenders across the country to become digital ready and enhance the efficiency of their lending process.Aye FinanceAye Finance is one such commercial institution built around the mission to solve these challenges of funding MSMEs and enabling their inclusion into the mainstream of the economy. Aye Finance differentiates itself by creating a technically enabled process that builds credit insights through a variety of available business and behavioural data. This effective credit appraisal coupled with the use of modern workflow automation and a small but engaged workforce is helping bridge the gap between the MSMEs and organized lending.

Satya MicroCapitalSatya MicroCapital is an NBFC-MFI serving low-income entrepreneurs in India’s rural and urban areas. The firm provides prompt, convenient, and affordable collateral-free credit to unbanked and underserved people through a strong credit assessment and centralized approval system.HappyHappy assess over 1000 variables about the merchant to underwrite his micro business. Its credit model is based on the merchants level of business engagement with the partner, his behaviour towards borrowing, APIs, demographics & business trends. If the merchant is doing healthy business with the partner, he is likely to get a big credit line from Happy Loans. Promising a unique borrowing experience to Indians, Happy Loans provides customized loan offerings to microenterprise owners to meet their specific demands.

It even offers micro business loans that start at as low as Rs. 2,000 for durations as short as 30 days.MoneyTapMoneyTap is Indias first app-based consumer credit line. The "Credit Line" means that the bank will issue a limit of up to flat knitting machine Suppliers Rs. 5 Lakh, without any collateral or charging any interest. Against this limit, using the MoneyTap app, consumers can borrow as little as Rs. 3,000 or as much as Rs. 5 Lakh and repay it as EMIs from 2 months to 3 years. The app securely connects with the banking systems to give them not only an instant approval but also a credit limit, depending on individual credit history

The caller told the bank’s customer service representative (CSR) that his daughter is going to school in another country, and he wants to send her money via electronic funds transfer to pay her tuition. He needs to send the money to the overseas bank account as soon as possible. He’d tried to do this online but couldn’t complete the transaction and he needs help from a knowledgeable service agent. The CSR asked him a series of security questions to authenticate his identity. He provided the right account number, address and answers to the various security questions.Wanting to help this long-time customer, the CSR set up the funds transfer transaction and scheduled it for the next business day. The caller thanked her for being so helpful. What the CSR didn’t know is that she unwittingly just helped a fraudster steal thousands of Indian rupees from a real customer’s account.

This story is far from unique. Call center fraud is a large and growing problem. The research and advisory firm Aite Group claims that 61% of all fraud cases can be traced back to a call center. Fraudsters use a call center for data mining and account takeovers – for example, by changing an account password or customer address – and this becomes a launching point for cross-channel attacks. Aite predicts that call center related fraud losses will double by 2020. That prediction might prove true given that in 2017, 40% of businesses saw their call center fraud levels China glove knitting machine Manufacturers increase.Nilesh Dherange, CTO for Gurucul says, "Several factors are causing the increase.

The transition to EMV (chip) cards drove a six-fold increase in call center fraud attempts the year EMV was implemented. In addition, the vast amount of account numbers and other personal data that has been stolen through data breaches make it easier for criminals to pass through the knowledge-based authentication process that most call centers use. Then they use social engineering to dupe the helpful CSRs."A cat and mouse game makes fraudulent behavior harder to spot.A criminal might make several calls to "prime the pump" for his eventual fraud attack. For example, he might call one time to reset an account password and call again days later to provide a new mailing address. Those activities, in and of themselves, don’t typically raise a red flag for risk, especially when a different CSR handles each call.

However, viewed holistically with other transactions, these actions could paint a pattern of high-risk behavior. A CSR would not see this pattern due to his limited view of a single call ticket, so technology must be used to root it out.Another common trick that fraudsters use is to spoof the phone number shown through Caller ID using software readily available on the Internet. The fraudster can appear to be calling from the victim’s geographic region or actual phone number. This makes data such as the phone number and the call location origin poor sources of caller authentication.Fraud analytics can identify risky calls and transactionsIn any call center, the CSR is focused on taking care of customers’ needs and providing a good customer experience. The CSR is not focused on screening for fraud—and this is as it should be. Instead, technology can be used to find the signals of fraudulent behavior and bring them to light for assessment and, if necessary, mitigation.

This is what a modern fraud management engine can do with incredible accuracy so that the employees of the call center can focus on providing superior service.Enterprise fraud management platforms have been around for years, but many legacy platforms lack the capabilities to make critical data associations and identify anomalous behaviors of user accounts. However, recent advancements in a range of technologies from Big Data to machine learning have come together to help build a new kind of advanced fraud analytics platform.This type of solution uses machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, to analyze millions of datapoints from a variety of siloed, cross-channel sources, such as a ticketing system, the phone system, a source of transactions such as a core banking system (CBS), and even public databases. By ingesting and linking vast amounts of data from these disparate systems, the fraud analytics engine can identify anomalous behavior quickly—often in real time, which provides the opportunity to deploy a mitigation that prevents a financial loss.Consider the caller who says he wanted to send money to his daughter.

Data from the ticketing system could show that someone changed the password on this account just days earlier. Data from the CBS could show that the foreign account that the money was to go to was just recently added. Data from the phone system could show that the time of day of the call was inconsistent with previous calls associated with this account. And, data from public records could show that the real account holder has no children."Individually, these pieces of data might be curious but not necessarily suspicious. Aggregated and associated with each other, they raise a red flag of risk. A modern fraud analytics engine produces a risk score that, if sufficiently high, alerts management.

Mitigation actions can be automated; for example, to cancel the scheduled payment transfer before it can happen," said Dherange. Financial institutions are highly regulated, with a fiduciary responsibility to protect their depositors’ and investors’ interests and assets. An advanced fraud analytics platform is a necessity to accurately detect fraud in real time and to have the opportunity to disrupt the scheme and prevent the loss.

The issue of "tamperability" of EVMs has been doing the rounds ever since EVMs were first introduced. Every time a political party loses an election, it blames the machine. However, none of them has been able to prove the allegations against the credibility of the EVMs, and neither do they apologise when they win the elections through the same EVMs. All that this manage to do, however, is shake the trust of the people in the system.A lot of people, giving the example of Germany, say that EVMs have been declared as illegal by the German Supreme Court. I would, however, like to point out that the German Court has not declared EVMs illegal because they found any fault with the technology, but because the German Constitution specifically mentions that the voting needs to be transparent.

Based on the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, and the principle that all essential steps in the elections are subject to public examinability, the Court said, "When electronic voting machines are deployed, it must be possible for the citizen to check the essential steps in the election act and in the ascertainment of the results reliably and without special expert knowledge."We must remember that our own Supreme Court had given a similar judgement 27 years before its German counterpart in 1982, saying that the Representation of the People Act mentions only ballot paper and not EVM.The Representation of the People Act, 1951, was then amended to allow for electronic voting. The point was a legal one and there was no question about the effectiveness of the technology, both in the case of Germany and India.Critics often also cite the examples of a few European nations, including the Netherlands and Italy, who have withdrawn the machine. They, however, fail to mention that all the machines in the said nations were made by the same Dutch company.

The machines were rejected because the software on which they were running was found to be vulnerable.Like any machinery, EVMs are of different varieties and technologies. Failure of one does not imply faultiness in all others. In fact, if EVMs were so prone to manipulation, we would have never seen a change of regime in the country!EVMs make the election process transparent. Counting is more efficient and the results can be declared in 3-4 hours instead of the traditional 30-40 hours taken to count votes manually. Further, EVMs have also ended the problem of invalid votes. The EVMs are not connected with any external sources whatsoever and, therefore, there is neither any scope of data leak, nor of tampering. Along with the technical security, custodial security of the machines from the factories to the polling booths is equally important. At no stage, the machines go into private hands.

The EC has to ensure that no lapse ever takes place on this account. The VVPAT machines further reinforce the credibility of the EVMs. By allowing for verification of their respective votes, it ensures that there is no scope for doubt in the minds of the voters. In fact, in 2013, the Supreme Court had appreciated the China sweater machine Suppliers EC’s initiative to introduce VVPATs and had directed the government to provide adequate funds for it. The failure of the VVPATs, though unfortunate, should not shake the faith of the people in the Election Commission and the Indian democracy. The repolls were successfully conducted in the affected areas.The Election Commission ensures free and fair elections in the country, an absolute must for a well-functioning democracy. In case of a machine failure, the EC has to replace the machinery within half an hour. In the instant case, the EC’s failure to do so within the stipulated timeframe shows that its preparedness fell short somewhere.

The CEC was honest enough to admit "inadequately trained staff" responsible for the malfunctioning of VVPATs.I am sanguine that a critical introspection of what went wrong and how it would be prevented in future must be under way in the commission. I believe the EC should be more communicative regarding the EVMs and VVPATs and constantly reassure the nation regarding their legitimacy. It must immediately put to rest any doubts regarding the credibility of the machines. Technology is the future of India, and not just its democracy and, EVMs have made India the proud global leader.(The writer is a former Chief Election Commissioner and the author of An Undocumented Wonder — The Making of the Great Indian Election. He is also a distinguished fellow at Trivedi Centre for Political Data, Ashoka University)