C-DAC, IBM collaborate to develop "Shrutlekhan-Rajbhasha"

New Delhi

August 20th, 2007

Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and IBM India Research
Laboratory announced the development of "Shrutlekhan-Rajbhasha", a
Hindi speaker independent, continuous speech recognition system using IBM
Desktop Hindi Speech Recognition technology.

"Shrutlekhan-Rajbhasha" is part of C-DAC's ongoing MANTRA-Rajbhasha
project for ensuring a high level of accuracy in English to Hindi translation in
the domain of Administration, Finance, Agriculture and Small Scale Industry
sponsored by Department of Official Language, Ministry of Home Affairs,
Government of India. The system is used as a tool in the MANTRA-Rajbhasha System
to facilitate the correction of the translated Hindi text.

The IBM Desktop Hindi Speech Recognition technology developed by IBM India
Research Laboratory has been used to integrate the speaker independent
continuous speech recognition of Hindi to edit the translated text through
"Shrutlekhan-Rajbhasha" in the MANTRA-Rajbhasha System.

The IBM Desktop Hindi Speech Recognition technology understands and
transcribes human speech with little use of keyboards, thereby helping people
unfamiliar with computers or the Hindi language. Since there are various
keyboards in use for Indian languages, speech recognition eliminates the need to
learn different keyboard mapping. The technology has been tested and trained for
variations over a large number of speakers from different regions of the
country. The technology could be also useful in voice-enabling ATM kiosks and in
car navigation systems.

In the Indian context, there are large variations in the pronunciation of the
same word by various users hailing from different parts of the country. C-DAC
has also collected a large amount of data from users belonging to different
states and captured the variations in speech output. A data analysis was
conducted to build the spellchecker for Hindi to correct the spoken-word-errors
that has increased the accuracy of the system and it also includes the domain
specific dictionaries to provide a better quality output.

"Shrutlekhan-Rajbhasha" has also been integrated with a number of
other user-friendly features such as the facility for conversion of Text to
Number (digits and decimal), date and currency format. It also provides the
facility to convert Unicode text into ISFOC fonts to enable a user to import the
text to any Windows based application.

"Shrutlekhan-Rajbhasha", developed by C-DAC for promoting use of
hindi for official and other purposes, is one example of how IBM speech
recognition technology might be used to make people's lives easier" said
Daniel Dias, Director, IBM India Research Laboratory. "IBM believes
collaborations such as this hold the key to driving innovation that matters for
the world."

S Ramakrishnan, Director General, C-DAC added, "The coming together of
IBM and C-DAC is a step forward towards enabling speech technologies to benefit
sizeable Indian population already using Hindi to benefit from a greater degree
of technology penetration in their daily lives. C-DAC is happy to combine its
expertise and strengths with IBM, a global IT major for a cause that is far
reaching in expanse.