Update: Sarbvir Singh, MD of Capital18 has informed MediaNama that Capital18 does only VC and PE investments - the private treaty deals handled by Synergy18; (and this is a Capital18 investment, not a Synergy18 deal). Singh appears extremely bullish on Ubona as a white labeled solutions provider - with deals on revenue sharing basis. He said that the company will be rolling out solutions for 4-5 "Large National Brands" in the next few months. Original story: Voice is the flavour of the season in India. After OnMobile acquired French Speech Recognition company Telisma, Ubona, a voice search company has received an undisclosed Series A round of investment from Capital18, the investment arm of the Network18 Group. Ubona apparently has developed a patent-pending set of speech recognition systems, tailored to the Indian context - languages, accents and dictions. At present, Ubona has a Foodie Hotline for Bangalore, and I just tried it out, from Delhi, by dialing 080-40700000 Hey, it's McDonalds, not... Maybe it's my sleepy 8:00am voice, but I just tried a voice search for McDonalds, and the speech recognition offered me the following choices - Monark, Inox, Mughals, Shinoi Foods, before finally getting it right. McDonalds is present in multiple locations, so this was a trick question, and I was interested in finding out how Ubona deals with that problem. They offered the following choices - Kormangala, Cunningham Road, Old Madras Road, Brigade Road, with an option to list more. On choosing Koramangala, they connected me to McDonalds, after…
