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Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Shaktikanta Das has officially unveiled UPI on RuPay credit cards and UPI Lite for feature phones, along with announcing that the Bharat Bill Pay System (BBPS) will enable cross-border bill payments. 

Similar to those found on digital payment apps, UPI Lite is an ‘on-device wallet’ aimed at enabling offline transactions of smaller values, while BBPS will enable ‘inbound’ cross-border bill payments. 

Tesla is floating ambitious plans to deploy thousands of humanoid robots, known as Tesla Bot or Optimus, within its factories. The project might eventually lead to the deployment of millions of robots around the world. Is this the rise of the machines?

Today is National Chai Day and the International Day of Peace. Coincidence? Definitely not. After all, the perfect cup of chai can solve almost any problem.

Did you know India is the second-largest tea producer in the world? Some studies even indicate that 80% of Indians begin their day with a cup of tea. 

Tell us what is your go-to drink to start your day.

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• Edtech for doctors
• Flipkart’s Metaverse gift for Diwali
• Language processing made easy

Here’s your trivia for today: Which is the oldest film studio in the world?

Healthcare

Edtech for doctors

Doctors in India are required to complete 30 hours of CME (Continuing Medical Education) every five years to renew their licences by attending workshops and seminars, which are organised by various healthcare institutions in India.

Post COVID-19, technology is playing a huge role in helping doctors complete these learning goals. 

Doctor’s orders

• The doctor-population ratio in India is 1:1,456 against the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendation of 1:1,000, according to the Economic Survey 2019-20.
• Clirnet, a doctor-generated content platform, witnessed a surge in doctor enrolment in the past three years, with the number shooting up to 250,000 from a mere 25,000 pre-COVID.
• Another startup MedLern says it brings healthcare training and skilling resources to diverse healthcare professionals and settings—from large multi-city hospital chains in major cities to sub-50 bed hospitals in Tier II cities and beyond.

Funding Alert

Startup: Zopper 

Amount: $75M

Round: Series C

Startup: TrueFoundry 

Amount: $2.3M

Round: Seed

Startup: TurboHire 

Amount: $2M

Round: Pre-Series A

Metaverse 

Flipkart’s Metaverse gift for Diwali

Flipkart is launching Flipverse, an interactive virtual shopping destination, in India. A source close to the development has confirmed to The Decrypting Story that the ecommerce giant has teamed up with social media behemoth Meta and Ethereum scaling solution Polygon for the project.

Interactive CX:

• The ecommerce giant is expected to make an official announcement of Flipverse during Flipkart’s Big Billion Day sale, which takes place during Diwali.
• Flipverse will also host games, contests, drops, NFTs, brand activations, product launches, and mystery boxes.
• Earlier in April, Flipkart announced the launch of an in-house innovation capability Flipkart Labs to build Web3 solutions.

SaaS

Language processing made easy

NeuralSpace, a software as a service (SaaS) platform, is fixing the language barrier in technology by offering developers a web interface and a suite of APIs for text and voice NLP tasks (language AI models) in more than 100 languages. 

It offers a suite of APIs for language AI models, with features such as entity recognition, language understanding, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, machine translation, and transliteration.

Found in translation:

• NeuralSpace can automatically detect the language a person writes in, translate between languages, transcribe what has been said into text, identify speakers in a meeting, and create a synthetic voice that reads out text.
• The technology is specially developed for locally spoken languages in India, Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
• The NLP startup recently joined Colarado-based Techstars, a global investment platform that provides access to capital and one-on-one mentorship, and received a $2.8-million Seed investment.

News & updates

• Hit dislike: Ever wondered why YouTube keeps showing you the same kind of content despite disliking similar videos? Mozilla researchers have found that buttons like “not interested,” “dislike,” “stop recommending channel,” and “remove from watch history” on YouTube are largely ineffective at preventing similar content from being recommended. 
• Carbon tax: The UN secretary general has said that developed economies should impose an extra tax on the profits of fossil fuel firms, with the funds diverted to countries affected by climate change and households struggling with the cost-of-living crisis.
• Counting ants: One recent research tried to figure out the number of ants in the world. Estimates show that the planet harbours about 20 quadrillion ants. That’s 20 thousand million millions, or in numerical form, 20,000,000,000,000,000 (20 with 15 zeroes).

What you should watch out for

• Twitter may roll out the Edit button for public testing today.

Which is the oldest film studio in the world?

Answer: Situated in London, Will Barker Studios, which is now known as Ealing Studios. It has been operating since 1902.

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