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Nara - Voice Technology For Innovative Cities

Nara creates human-like voices to be deployed across urban infrastructure such as transportation hubs, and accessibility troubled locations.

Photo of Christian Flores
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Nara generates custom human-like voices that can be deployed cost-effectively at scale to improve accessibility, safety, and overall rider satisfaction in public transportation.

The ease-of-use and ability to work anywhere allows Nara voices the opportunity to have an impact in everyday city life. Initially, our focus would be to improve the quality, and understandability of voice for public transportation methods. Our voices are created specifically to speak slowly, and clearly, and can also be translated to several other languages.

Describe who will use your solution (1,000 characters)

Our technology would be used by all Indianapolis residents who rely on public transportation using Nara voices for alerts providing audible warnings, announcements, or transit updates.

Describe your solution's stage of development


Insights from previous testing (500 characters)

Our work is focused on improving 3 key areas that we believe will have outsized impact, based on early customer feedback. 1. Voice quality. 2. Cost to create a new voice. 3. Support more languages for translation.

Tell us about your team or organization (500 characters)

The Nara team consists of technology, and media experts with experience building technology solutions to solve real-world problems at scale.

Size of your team or organization

  • 2-10

Funding Request

  • $50,000

Rough Budget (500 characters)

$10,000 - On-site assessment for technical requirements. $25,000 - Create the "Voice of Indianapolis" $10,000 - Hardware requirements

Describe how you would pilot your idea (1000 characters)

We will start by testing our voices against traditional voice intercoms and speaker boxes by determining key performance indicators (efficacy, quality, and understandability) based on transportation rider feedback and internal qualitative assessment in comparisons with the historical performance of similar methods.


Our success is measured in how well our technology is serving the public. We'll begin by defining a customer service poll based on the most painful elements of poor audible alerts in public transportation, such as missed stops, poor audio quality, lack of support for multiple languages (understandability) and overall customer satisfaction. We expect to reduce the number of missed stops, overall customer satisfaction, traffic throughput, and stress on transportation operators who may otherwise be inundated by questions from the public.

Sustainability Plan (500 characters)

Nara technology is sustainable because we're not strictly providing an enhanced service for residents with disabilities, but rather a better experience for all residents. We believe these enhancements provide significant benefits to the overall public and contribute greatly to the mindset of the public when considering public transportation cost increases. Our cost-effective operations mean we can continue service with much less overhead than other public services already in-use.

1 comment

Join the conversation:

Photo of Madhan K

Hi, what are the real time inputs for your voice server to dynamically change the out put, like is there any automation to change.