Reverie Language Technologies

Reverie Language Technologies is a language technology company based in Bengaluru, Karnataka, that builds tools for translation, localisation and voice interaction in Indian languages. Registered through its website at reverieinc.com, the company works with businesses, device makers and government organisations that need to reach users who do not use English as their first language online. In the Indian information ecosystem it functions as a specialist service provider behind the scenes: media, e-commerce, banking and public-service platforms use its technology to publish and operate in multiple Indian languages, and its work is regularly discussed in coverage of India's vernacular internet.

Founding and Early Years

Reverie was founded in November 2009 by brothers Arvind Pani and Vivekananda Pani together with S. K. Mohanty, starting with seed capital of Rs 1 crore, according to reports of its later fundraising. Arvind Pani, an alumnus of the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, served as co-founder and chief executive. The founding idea, described by Pani in interviews, was a gap visible when smartphones were first spreading in India: display text and interfaces offered little or no support for Indian languages. The stated objective was that an Indian-language user should be able to do everything on the internet with the same ease as an English-language user. From the beginning the company therefore treated language not as a translation add-on but as core infrastructure for digital access.

First Products: Display, Input and Text Processing

The company's early product suite addressed the three basic problems of using Indian languages on a device. It developed display technologies, including language fonts and a rendering engine so that complex Indic scripts could be shown correctly on screens. It developed input methods, including keypads with predictive typing and dictionaries, so users could type in their own language on both ordinary keypads and touchscreens. And it developed text processing, including transliteration, so that text could be converted between languages and scripts. Reports from 2013 note that these solutions could be embedded not only in mobile phones but also in set-top boxes, navigation devices and other appliances, and that the platform at that stage supported more than 45 languages. This device-level work placed Reverie in the supply chain of handset makers at a time when low-cost smartphones were bringing large numbers of first-time internet users online in India.

Funding and Growth

In August 2015 Reverie raised about $4 million (Rs 26.5 crore) in a Series A round from Aspada Investment Company and existing investor Qualcomm Ventures India. The company said the money would expand its presence in consumer internet, financial services, government and enterprise software, and would also fund a sales and marketing network in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Former Vodafone India senior executive Jonathan Bill joined the company's board as a strategic adviser in 2013, with a brief focused on scaling the language platform for applications and content services in Indian and international markets. By 2018 the company was reported to be seeking a larger Series B round to fund its next phase, reflecting a market in which hundreds of millions of new internet users were expected to be Indian-language users rather than English users.

Language as a Service

Reverie's central offering became a cloud-based Language-as-a-Service platform, branded LaaS, which delivers localisation through application programming interfaces. Through the platform, clients can add local-language translation, transliteration, device input and search to their own websites and applications without building language capability themselves. Company descriptions of the platform list technologies including neural machine translation, natural language understanding, speech-to-text, automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech. The model matters for media and information services because it allows a single source of content to be converted and presented in several Indian languages, widening the audience for news, public information and commercial services in a country where English fluency covers only a minority of the population.

Prabandhak and Anuvadak

Two named products organise Reverie's localisation work. Prabandhak is described as a translation management platform — in the company's own earlier description, a marketplace for Indian language translations — that streamlines multilingual content workflows, keeps terminology consistent across platforms and incorporates machine translation, translation memory and Indian-language spell checking. Anuvadak is a platform for website and application localisation and multilingual domain management: it is intended to accelerate the process of creating, launching and optimising a website in multiple languages, with contextually relevant translation of website text. Together the two products cover the practical pipeline of multilingual publishing, from managing translators and translation assets to putting a fully localised site live, which is the point at which Indian-language readers encounter the content.

Voice Technology and the Gopal Suite

Reverie expanded from text into voice with Gopal, an Indic voice suite launched in 2018 for chatbots and interactive voice response systems. Gopal was released in 12 languages: Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Assamese, Odia, Punjabi and Indian English. The company said the suite could understand user queries and infer intent in each supported language, that its speech recognition engine was sensitive to dialect, and that it had been tested in use cases such as banking applications and mobile recharges. Voice was a strategic step because many first-time internet users face difficulties with English text input and keyboards; speaking to a service in a familiar language removes that barrier. The speech recognition system could also work as an input tool, converting speech into text for voice typing. Reverie's later voice suite descriptions describe speech transcription in 11 Indian languages, alongside text-to-speech and natural language understanding APIs.

Swalekh and Consumer Tools

For end users, Reverie produced Swalekh, a multilingual Indic keyboard application for Android smartphones and tablets launched in 2015. Swalekh allowed typing in the user's language of choice and supported 11 languages at launch. The keyboard illustrates the company's two-sided approach: enterprise platforms for businesses and governments on one side, and consumer tools that let individuals themselves write, search and communicate in Indian languages on the other. Its text display suite, a font and rendering package, served the same purpose on the reading side, making digital content more local-language friendly on devices whose built-in support for Indic scripts was incomplete.

Clients and Sectors

Reported clients have spanned commerce, mobility, health, banking and government. Company and press accounts list Ola, Practo, Vijaya Bank, Reliance Jio, BHIM, the Government eMarketplace and eNAM among the customers using its language services, particularly as the company pushed into financial services, telecom and e-commerce as early adopters of voice and localisation technology. For such clients, the service is practical rather than cosmetic: a banking app, recharge flow or government marketplace that works in Hindi, Tamil or Bengali can be used independently by customers who would otherwise need an intermediary. In the public sector, Reverie has said it intended to work with government and regulatory bodies on Indian language standards, positioning localisation as part of national digital infrastructure rather than a private marketing choice.

Acquisition by Reliance

In February 2019 Reliance Industries announced a strategic investment in Reverie through Reliance Industrial Investments and Holdings, a wholly owned subsidiary of Reliance Industries. Reports of the transaction put the first tranche at about Rs 190 crore, with a further Rs 77 crore to follow by March 2021, taking Reliance to about 83.3 per cent of Reverie's equity on a fully diluted basis. Reverie said the partnership would support integration of its Indic language localisation services with Reliance's digital consumer platforms, and that it would continue its mission of language equality on the internet. The deal was widely read in the Indian technology press as significant because an Indian conglomerate was buying an Indian company solving an Indian problem: the language-enablement layer for the mass-market internet that Reliance Jio was building with low-cost handsets and inexpensive data.

Place in India's Language Technology Sector

Reverie occupies a distinct place among Indian information services because it supplies capability rather than content. News publishers, broadcasters and portals serving vernacular audiences depend on fonts that render correctly, keyboards that accept input, search that understands transliterated queries and translation systems that keep pace with daily publishing; Reverie's products address each of those layers. Its current service descriptions continue to emphasise end-to-end localisation — translation, transliteration, voice, video localisation with subtitles and automated voice-over, and APIs for translation, speech-to-text and text-to-speech — plus tools such as Sansadhak, a no-code builder for multilingual voice and chat bots. Founded when Indian languages were largely absent from phone displays, the Bengaluru company remains one of the specialist firms most often cited when Indian media report on how the internet is being rebuilt for the country's non-English-speaking majority.