Shuttl uses ‘data over sound’ to verify its passengers

Tamlin is online editor at Techworld and ComputerworldUK. He has previously covered a wide range of beats at a variety of publications, from European channel markets, enterprise cloud and privacy to architecture, design, film and music. He is particularly interested in the intersection between technology, the political sphere and the day-to-day.

An Uber-esque app that serves New Delhi’s population of more than 16.5 million with on-demand shuttle buses was struggling to authenticate its passengers, so it turned to a unique ‘date over sound’ company for help.

Shuttl launched in New Delhi in 2015, targeted at professionals who could not afford expensive on-demand taxis but still wanted to avoid the extremely crowded public transport networks, which were struggling to cope with a quickly growing population.

The app works like this: customers book a bus through an app on their phone and select a preferred boarding point and drop-off point across more than 100 routes. When the booking is confirmed, the passenger heads to their pick-up point for an estimated time and boards the bus, where they have a guaranteed seat.

In its first year the company got 500 buses running throughout Delhi averaging 15,000 trips a day. Shuttl claims it reached one million rides before its first birthday.

Because of this quick growth, Shuttl quickly found itself struggling with ways to authenticate its many passengers – and felt worried that failure to figure this out could lead to more congestion across Delhi, the very problem it was originally attempting to address.

“This year in January, ride volumes were going up and we were looking for a technical solution to authenticate users on our platform,” Karan Aggarwal, AVP of innovation at Shuttl, tells Techworld. “Basically, if you have your device and you place a booking, we wanted to know the customers who placed the booking were indeed the person who was boarding.”

“A lot of bookings were happening and we were unable to actually authenticate users,” he explains. “It’s a legal requirement in our country that you need to have the identity of the person who’s boarding.”

A manual approach wouldn’t work, then.