IBM launches Hindi speech recognition tech

Software major IBM has developed a speech recognition technology in Hindi which would help physically challenged and less literate Hindi speakers access information through a variety of applications.

The Desktop Hindi Speech Recognition Technology developed by the IBM India Software Lab, in collaboration with the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, would provide an interface for human-computer interaction.

The technology helps transcribe continuous speech in Hindi instantly into text form and could find use in a variety of applications such as voice-enabled ATMs, car navigation systems, banking, telecom, railways and airlines, said IBM India Research Laboratory Director, Daniel Dias.

The system can recognise more than 75,000 Hindi words with variations in dialects, providing an accuracy level of 90-95 per cent, he said.

A spell checker to correct spoken word errors enhances the accuracy. The technology has integrated many user-friendly features such as facility to convert text to digits and decimals, date and currency format, and into fonts which could be imported to any windows-based application.

"IBM believes in taking high-end research to the benefit of the masses and bridging the digital divide through a faster diffusion process," Dias said.

The technology 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.