The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : Breaking new grounds in Tamil software computing

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Mar 13, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

Breaking new grounds in Tamil software computing

By Karthik Subramanian

CHENNAI, MARCH 12. Aside from high cost, one major reason for poor PC penetration in India is the lack of local language software. But engineering students of some colleges in the State have demonstrated that the situation can change quickly.

Last year Kanithamizh Sangam, a non-profit society of software professionals, launched a project `Kaniyam' (Tamil for computing). The idea was to encourage computer science students to come up with Tamil language software solutions. Students of 18 colleges were selected and given a year to develop the solutions, with the promise of cash awards for the best projects. As the deadline approaches, the student teams today came back to Chennai for a final review of their projects before evaluation.

Optical pen

The ideas ranged from software for Tamil SMS messaging to a cost-effective optical pen, which would help in character recognition.

A team from Shri Andal Alagar Engineering College, comprising K. Sankar, V.K. Ilamgumaran and S. Senthil Anand, was hard-pressed to come up with a cheap hardware device that would help in handwriting recognition.

"The handwriting recognition devices available in the market — ultrasound pen, digital pen and digital pad — are quite costly. The accuracy factor is also not good," the students explained.

They came up with a simple solution: They modified the optical mouse in the form of a pen. When the user writes with the pen on a notebook, the optical character reader software will trace the X:Y coordinates. Simultaneously, software running on the computer will recognise the nearest Tamil alphabet to represent it digitally.

Moving from the written to spoken word, students of the Tiruchi-based J.J. College of Engineering and Technology — M. Nalini, P. Selvakumar and R. Weslee Luckwinraj — have developed a speaker-independent voice recognition software in Tamil, which they hope will find application in the railway reservation system.

Their software uses a voice recognition engine of a popular proprietary software to identify the word; then a transliteration software coverts the identified word into its Tamil equivalent. Thus, when a caller dials a railway reservation system and speaks on the phone, the processing can be done digitally and the ticket printed in Tamil.

Students of Velammal Engineering College here have unveiled a Java-based program that facilitates mobile-to-mobile Tamil SMS (short message service).

A.C. Senthil Muthukumar, S. Sindhuja and R. Shankar said users would need to download the software on their GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) mobile phones to use the service. Once their program is fully functional, they hope, they will market it to mobile service providers.

Manoj R. Annadurai, a Tamil software developer and president of the Sangam, said some of the projects were unique. "It is easy to patch up a program from the codes available at open source web sites on the Internet. But the students have opted for more original and difficult ideas."

Software engineers said a career in local language computing could be just as fulfilling as any career in IT sector. They pointed out that the Department of Information Technology recently initiated the Technology Development in Indian Languages programme.

The Sangam is still evaluating the software and will announce the prizes shortly.

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