The telecom operators are witnessing their call rate margins shrink dramatically as the business models have changed from a regulated market to a relatively free market. The challenge, therefore, is in building a strategy that fosters sustained growth. Most of the operators in the telecommunication sector recognized the cash cow hidden in the form of Value Added Services (VAS). To sustain the growth, operators are bringing in innovative features in VAS with the support of Huawei Technologies', a leading telecommunication infrastructure provider that helps the operators to grab the market.

Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham) estimates the total size of the mobile VAS market at about $1.2 billion (Rs. 4,950 crore), which is growing by 50-65 percent every year. Recognizing the trend, the Shenzhen based Huawei Technologies is betting big on music based services, the principal money-spinner after SMS. The engineers at Huawei Bangalore Research and Development Center are trying to figure out a way to replace the traditional way of setting up Ring Back Tone (RBT), which is a hassle for a layman. Currently, the way to set up tones in a mobile phone is by dialing a particular number and making a choice from the collection or by entering the RBT codes, which are published in the newspaper. However, when it arrives the market, the users or subscribers are not aware of the database or codes available.

Now the engineers are trying to make this process very natural, where the users can hum the song themselves and the software recognizes the speech as well as melody and presents the user with the closest matching song.

Out of India's 1.1 billion populations, 220 million are mobile subscribers and this base is growing by seven million a month and is expected to reach a staggering 500 million by 2011. Hence if a group of subscribers are not aware of the services available the operator is loosing a huge chunk of market. "Hence we are trying to make this process simpler and natural through automatic speech recognition," says Anil Kumar Pandey, Associate Vice President R&D, Head - Telecom Intelligence Services, Huawei.

Though the team at Huawei has developed a technology that can transform the users within a few years, they face some challenges in technological expertise. The challenge lies in developing the expertise in which the songs sung in different modulations by different users are recognized and matched to the database, though the basic technology of speech recognition is available. "As the number of users and the size of the database increase, the system should be able to respond quickly as soon as a subscriber requests for a ring tone. Hence, we are aiming at using an algorithm that can deliver 90-95 percent of success rate in voice recognition," says Pradip Kumar Das, Group Manager - CRBT. Moreover the team is finding a solution for instances where the user may know only two or three words from the entire song to hum.