Sachin Pilot Releases Text-to- Speech System in Six Indian Languages :

Web Based Optical Character Recognition System for 2 Languages also Launched

Technologies to Provide Audio Interface to Visually Challenged

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) .

Source: PIB Release. September 22, 2011