New software to help Orissa's unlettered send e-mail

Monday, 19 May 2003, 19:30 IST
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BHUBANESWAR: A team of experts in Orissa has developed new software that would enable the unlettered in the state to send e-mail. "One does not need to be computer literate or need to use the keyboard. He or she needs to speak the message in the mother tongue and provide the e-mail address, leaving the rest to the computer," Sanghamitra Mohanty, head of the team that developed the software, told IANS. "The computer will automatically write whatever you speak before it in Oriya and can translate it. It then takes the message to its destination," she added. Orissa Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik unveiled the software here Friday. Mohanty headed a team of 18 students of Utkal University who developed this speech-to-text software after two and a half years of hard work under the federal communication and IT ministry's Language Software Development Project. "These kinds of software are available in other languages, but not in Oriya. This software translates not only Oriya to English but also English to Oriya," Mohanty said. The team has developed six software packages to help the unlettered and semi-literate use a computer and to break the language barrier between Oriya and English. Among them is the optical character recognisation system, which can memorise text by just scanning it. "Using this we can preserve books," said Mohanty. Explained another member of the team: "With the conventional IT standards, we scan the pages of a book and keep it in image files that eat up huge space on a computer. But with this new software the computer will scan the pages and keep it in text format. We can keeps hundreds of books in this format."
Source: IANS
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