Sachin Pilot releases Text-to- Speech System in six Indian languages

New Delhi , September 22,2011 16:50 IST   

Shri Sachin Pilot, the Minister of State for Communications and Information Technology today released the CD containing Text-To- Speech system (TTS) in

six Indian languages. These are Hindi, Marathi, Bangla, Telugu, Tamil & Malayalam He also launched web based Optical Character Recognition systems (OCR)

for Hindi & Punjabi. Speaking on the occasion, Shri Pilotk said that this initiative is a significant step towards digital inclusion of differently abled

people from different linguistic background.

Technology Development for Indian Language (TDIL) Programme of the Department of Information Technology, under a consortium project has developed this

Text-To- Speech system. TTS has also been integrated with Non Visual Desktop Access (NVDA) screen reader and Optical Character Recognition System (OCRA).

OCR system developed under a TDIL consortium Project for Hindi & Punjabi was also provided on TDIL Data Centre to get user feedback, while the challenges

of computationally intensive technology research are parallely being addressed.

Besides linguistic diversity, these technologies will cater to the needs of differently-abled people and will go a long way in assisting them to become

part of the Information Technology mainstream.It is hoped that use of these technologies will provide an impetus towards wider usage of Indian languages

for governance and related applications and will augment social inclusiveness & reach out to specially-abled section of the society.

Text-to-Speech is computer software which renders the machine readable text into Human Voice. The TTS software shall enable people with visual impairments

or low vision disabilities to listen to written works on a computer or a mobile device. Text to Speech system integrated with screen reader would enable

visually challenged users to interpret and perform computer operations with audio interface. It allows easy navigation using the screen reader facility.

Optical Character Recognition systems convert paper documents to electronic form so that printed books and records can be accessed and processed using

computer based techniques. OCR for Indian scripts can make this literature web accessible. Further, one can use OCR-ed electronic data to generate Braille

version of printed books for visually challenged. Also OCR`s can enable text-to-speech systems to deliver Indian language books through the medium of audio.

The TTS with Screen Reader (NVDA and OCRA) CD can be obtained on request from Prof Hema Murthy (hema@cse.iitm.ac.in) and OCR can be accessed from TDIL

Data Centre (http://www.tdil-dc.in) .

 

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