Gaana Antakshari

Teaching Google’s Voice
Assistant to play Antakshari

The Creative Ask

Baithe Baithe Kya Karen, Karna Hain Kuch Innovation!
Chalo Shuru Karein Interactive-AI-wali-Antakshari
Leke OK Google Ka Naam

About Gaana

Gaana offers listeners free, unlimited access to over 30 million Hindi songs, chart-topping Bollywood music, podcasts, and shows on its digital platform. As a brand, Gaana is committed to furthering its promise of ‘Bas Bajna Chahiye Gaana’ across touchpoints.

But in a crowded market, Gaana wished to reinforce its position as market leader by building a new, digital-native experience to appeal to its listeners and strengthen its perception as a future-forward, savvy, youthful brand.

The Agrahyah Response

To this end, Agrahyah consulted with the Gaana product team and conceptualized interactive AI-driven Antakshari, in Hindi, for Google Home devices as well as Android & iPhones for the very first time.

Why not invite the bot to play along and revive this crowd-pleasing game, and enable listeners to engage one-on-one with Gaana, in their leisure time, from the convenience of their mobile devices?

What Did We Do

We created a first-of-its-kind AI-driven gaming experience in Hindi, where users could activate Gaana Antakshari and play along with the bot, which was designed to recognize the last letter of the song that a user sang and play an actual Bollywood song back in response. The fun continues between the user and the bot for five consecutive turns, after which the player can continue to extend the experience or start afresh.

What makes this cool + challenging ?

While the gaming experience was deceptively for the end-user, on the backend, Agrahyah’s Conversational AI and VUI [Voice User Interface] experts built a robust technological framework to execute this experience flawlessly.

In particular, we had to solve for:
  • What would happen if a user sang gibberish? The bot would match the user response against its extensive database of recognised Bollywood songs and reject the nonsensical entry, and ask the user to sing a valid song to continue.
  • We also had to enable the bot to quickly parse the song in real-time as the user sang it, recognise the last syllable and offer back a valid Bollywood song response by picking up from where the user left off and make it happen in no time; every time!

The Outcomes

The Gaana Antakshari experience was accessed over a million times within 4 weeks of launch with zero marketing budget. It also went on to become world’s top ten most used Actions on Google worldwide.