Evolution of language service space
English is the de-facto global transactional language. With the working population in India being exposed to global companies directly, knowledge of conversational English has today become a necessity.
Apps such as enguru acknowledge the permanence of regional languages and make conversational English available at people's fingertips. However, the ability to monetise such services is yet to be established. Certification courses typically make money only when there is a brand value associated with it, which would entail a significant investment in building that brand, either through the B2C route or the B2B route. It would, therefore, be interesting to see how the investments (whether in Kings Learning or in the Tiger Global-funded Culture Alley) get utilised.
The popularity of services such as Google Translate also shows that the multilingual machine translation services are increasingly being relied upon globally and provide direction for the evolution of the language service space.
With the need for learning languages (especially English) established and the technology available, we need to see whether the mass working population is inclined to pay the ‘right’ price for such a service on their relatively low-priced smartphone, working on a relatively low-cost data plan.