Can't read? Talking phones will help

Reliance plans voice-based mobile services.

Illiterate but want to use a mobile phone? Not to worry""help is at hand, courtesy Reliance Infocomm. The Ambani company is launching speech-based applications. Quite simply, that means that an illiterate villager or urban dweller has merely to mention the name of the person he or she wants to talk to and, presto, the mobile phone will do the rest of the job""by scanning a Reliance phone directory.

More to the point, an illiterate person can speak in any of several Indian languages and dialects. So a villager in the western ghats of Maharashtra(who speaks a different Marathi dialect) can speak in his dialect into the phone, without pressing too many buttons.

Nor does he have to buy a new mobile phone. Says Mahesh Prasad, president, applications and solutions group, Reliance Infocomm: "We are working on a network-based technology that is independent of handsets. This will mean that the current handsets can be used to recognise and transmit voice signals."

Prasad declines to say when the service will be launched, but others expect it to be launched in a few months.

How do these voice-based commands work? The handset will recognise the command, translate it into text, retrieve the phone number of the person being telephoned from the data base, translate the data into voice and transmit it to the user's handset.

Globally, much work has been done to recognising speech in English (in various dialects). However, the biggest challenge is to offer this in various Indian languages with several dialects, besides commercialising these services, says Prasad.

Reliance Infocomm has already set up a dedicated team to look at the permutations and combinations of speech-based applications and products for customers.

According to the 2001 census, 34.62 per cent of India's population is illiterate. Reliance's current effort is clearly aimed at expanding the mobile services market.

Reliance is working on several "futuristic applications" for its R-World. It will soon be launching an application to make a mobile phone more accessible to the blind. This application, for which Tandem Infotech received a Dhirubhai Ambani Developers Programme award, enables a visually impaired person to "hear" missed calls or an SMS (which is automatically read out to him) and dial back the number.

Though the application is meant to directly benefit the blind, it is also expected to be a high utility tool for anyone using a mobile phone.