IBM develops technology to transcribe Hindi speech into text

New Delhi, Aug 16 (UNI) Software major IBM India today said in partnership with Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), it has developed a new technology, which will transcribe Hindi speech into text.

The software by IBM India Research Laboratory's 'Via Voice' speech recognition engine has been integrated in the 'Mantra Rajbhasha' software. At present it is used in Rajya Sabha.

''We are working on this software from last three to four years and experimenting it in 15 other languages worldwide,'' IBM India Research Laboratory Director Daniel Dias said.

The Desktop Hindi Speech Recognition technology understands and transcribes human speech with minimal use of keyboards, thereby helping people who are not computer savvy and do not know the national language.

The technology can be used in number of applications like voice-enabled ATMs, car navigation systems, banking, telecom, railways and airlines, Dr Dias said.

The system, he said, can recognise more than 75,000 Hindi words and uses a language model that is trained on a huge Hindi text corpus. It produces word recognition rates in the range of 90-95 per cent with speaker adaptations and 80-90 per cent without speaker adaptation.

A spellchecker to correct spoken-word errors also enhances the accuracy.

The technology has a number of other user-friendly features such as facility for conversion of text to numbers (digits and decimal), date and currrency format. It can also be used in diction applications -- letter writing, sending e-mails -- to speech-enable ATMs, kiosks and such devices.

The technology can be used for 'comman and control' and for data-entry in Hindi-based computer applications. Besides less literate, physically challenged people among the speakers of the language can access information through a variety of applications.

The technology also would enable C-DAC to ensure high-level accuracy in Hindi translation in a host of domains including administration, finance, agriculture and small-scale industry.

UNI