Shri Sachin Pilot, the minister of state for communications
and information technology, released the CD containing text-to-speech system
(TTS) in six Indian languages.
These are Hindi, Marathi, Bangla, Telugu, Tamil and
Malayalam. He also launched web based Optical Character Recognition systems
(OCR) for Hindi and Punjabi.
Pilot 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 and
reach out to specially-abled section of the society.
Text-to-Speech is a 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.
By Telecomlead.com Team
editor@telecomlead.com
