Interview with Neil Patel, Social Entrepreneur and Founder and CEO of Awaaz.De

Awaaz.De connects mobile voice-based technology with a social platform to provide low-cost, voice messages that can be shared with hundreds or thousands of people. Neil has described it as a “voice twitter”.

Awaaz.De originally focused on working with small farmers in rural Gujarat, a state in the central India, to enable the sharing of best farming practices and agricultural information.

The company’ has scaled and grown, won a number of awards, has facilitated over 4M calls to 400K people, is now in 6 countries, 9 languages and is constantly finding new applications for their technology.Neil received a Bachelors in Computer Science from UC Berkeley before pursuing his Ph.D at Stanford University. His doctoral thesis focus was designing voice-based virtual communities which led to the co-founding of Awaaz.De, along with his Ph.D advisor and UC Berkeley Professor, Dr. Tapan Parikh.

Listen to the Interview

 

Find Out More

• Neil’s page at Stanford, listing his story, publications, interests, and research
• Neil’s thesis Ph.D thesis defense video
• An in-depth interview with Neil on YourStory

• Website: https://www.awaaz.de/
• Value proposition: “We provide content to our partners and users in their local language to communicate with important stakeholders and beneficiaries for a variety of purposes and goals. Our clients include businesses, rural communities, schools, NGOs and many more.”
• Awaaz.De Streams – group voice messaging for everyone
• Awaaz.De Surveys – enabling rich data collection via phone survey surveys
• Awaaz.De Voice Forums – moderated voice message “chat rooms”