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 Pilot 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. Read more.

See: Northern Voices Online