Heard of Setu Software Systems? Chances are slim, for most people.

Well, the Hyderabad-based start-up is doing something that will perhaps put journalists in the first line of fire: it’s perfecting a code that makes a computer write an article without human intervention.The ‘summarisation’ technology is said to be the next level of making a machine think and generate text on its own.

“If you want to compare two mobile phone models and get an analysis done, the machine does the comparison and generates an article on the mobile phones on its own. We don’t need a writer to do the analysis. Similarly, if Sachin Tendulkar gets out at 99, the machine can generate an article by looking all such earlier occasions,” said Vasudeva Varma, chief scientist and co-founder of Setu.

The technology makes a machine generate an article in about 5-10 seconds though it needs training for a few hours before it can do so.

Setu has been in incubation for about two years.

The start-up focusing on search technologies and artificialintelligence has also roped in Srini Koppolu, former managing director of Microsoft India Development Centre as an angel investor and chairman.

Incubated at the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) in Hyderabad — Varma and another professor are co-founders — Setu focuses on a platform that has three prongs to it — search, analyse and summarise.

“The core intellectual property (IP) that has been developed by the Setu team has attracted me towards the company. Now, we are building a team and focusing on productising the technology that has been developed in the company,” Koppolu, who was instrumental in bringing Microsoft Research & Development to India and make the software major set up one of its biggest development centres outside Redmond in the US in Hyderabad.Koppolu, after his exit from Microsoft last year, has invested in Mojostreet, a mobile games company. Setu is his second investment.

“But I am not a part of management team at Mojostreet,” he said.What attracted him to Setu, he said, was the technology platform that is being developed. “We are now planning to develop a team and take the technology to the next level,” Koppolu said.

Setu’s 20-person team has been working on the search platform for the last three years and has already won several awards at international fora.

“We are filing for patents and we would seek about 10 patents for now,” said Varma.

Semantfire is another Stu technology that is ready for productisation. It reads text documents and extracts meaning out of them, which help the machines make smart decisions.

“If you input about 50 pages of text and make the machine summarise it, you will get a proper summary in about 250 words.”Setu’s search engine platform can support more than 70 non-English languages.

The engine allows the users to pose a query in their language and get search results in various languages.

“The platform is ready. We are now looking at various applications based on the platform. We are focusing on education sector. Though Setu is already licensing the technology to some of the corporate clients, our focus would be on health and other such sectors that have larger societal impact,” Koppolu said.