The Hindu : Karnataka / Mysore News : `Five per cent of population has hearing, language problems'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Nov 05, 2004

Karnataka

Karnataka - Mysore

`Five per cent of population has hearing, language problems'

By Our Staff Correspondent

K.S. Chari, Senior Director, Department of IT, Government of India, releasing a souvenir at the national seminar on speech processing in Mysore on Thursday. The AIISH Director, M. Jayaram (second from left) and S.R. Saraswathi, Head, Department of Sp eech Language Science, are seen.

MYSORE, NOV. 4. A two-day national workshop on "Speech processing," organised by the All-India Institute of Speech and Hearing (AIISH) commenced here on Thursday.

Inaugurating the workshop, K.S. Chari, Senior Director and Head, Microelectronics Process Technology Division, Ministry of Information Technology, reviewed the trends in electronics and information technology and dwelt upon applications of speech processing such as text-to-speech, voice recognition systems and multimodal systems in digital hearing aids.

It was pointed out that at least five per cent of India's population had hearing and language problems. Hence, there was a need to provide access to versatile communication aids for the speech impaired, Dr. Chari said. The future was likely to witness the convergence of network and voice enabled robotic systems.

He dwelt at length on the initiative of the Ministry of Information Technology and C-DM, Thiruvananthapuram, in the indigenous development of digital hearing aids. "Body-level" digital hearing aids had been developed and successfully tested, and the AIISH, Mysore, too was an active partner in this project, he said.

M. Jayaram, Director, AIISH, said that a closer interaction between biological and clinical scientists and electronics and communication engineers was imperative to provide a system that would help the disabled perceive speech in the manner of the human brain.

Sixty delegates from all over India are attending the workshop. The two-day programme will feature experts speaking on speech signal processing, signal processing in digital hearing aids and speech and speaker recognition.

A panel discussion on digital signal processing in hearing aids will also be held where it is likely that specifications for indigenous models of digital hearing aids will be finalised. Other specific projects that will benefit the speech, language and hearing disabled will also be identified during the two-day programme.

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