Hindi Morphological Tagger Written by Vasu Renganathan

IBM Research: Hindi Audio Visual Speech Recognition

"At the IBM India Research Lab (IRL), we are extending the IBM ViaVoiceTM recognition technology to build a speech recognition system for the Hindi language. We have identified a phone set consisting of 61 phonemes for Hindi. A mapping from the English phone set to Hindi phone set was used to bootstrap the English acoustic model to build the initial phone models for HindiP2. Using these models, we have built an acoustic model for Hindi by training it on a large sample of Hindi acoustic data. We have the setup to collect and transcribe speech samples that are used to train the acoustic models.

"We have built a statistical language model for Hindi, which captures the language statistics from a huge amount of text data. Currently we are working on increasing the accuracy of our Hindi speech recognition system by enhancing the Acoustic and Language models. The recognition system performs well over a trained context and we have a demo of a large vocabulary continuous speech Hindi recognition system at the Lab. Our goal is to cover more Indian languages and then to build a multilingual speech recognizor for the Indian languages based on a multilingual phone set."

Office suite for PCs at Rs 1995
Thru Rediff

"C K Technologies on Tuesday launched 'Shakti Office 1.72,' the latest version of its office suite software for personal computers, priced one-tenth of Microsoft's Office suite.

'We have priced Shakti Office 1.72 at Rs 1,995 compared to Microsoft office 2003 suite's Rs 30,000 plus,' Manoj R Annadurai, managing director, CK Technologies, told reporters in Chennai.
He said Shakti Office 1.72 was tailor-made for Indian market with bilingual capabilities.

'The bilingual feature allows users of the suite to switch over to either Hindi or Tamil, while using English,' he said."

From The Dominance of Angreziyat in Our Education by Madhu Kishwar on Sulekha (old article)

"I came to understand the full implications of the great harm being done by the dominating position of English in India as I went through the process of acquiring proficiency in it. For all my English-based education, I find myself a linguistic cripple. Even today, despite years of working in it, writing or even speaking in English does not come easily to me. I make all kinds of silly mistakes and find myself groping for words, unable to fully express my ideas and thoughts in English. I rarely make such mistakes when I write or speak in Hindi or Punjabi. English has not become the language of my dreams, my prayers or even humour. I find it really hard to crack a joke in English. At the same time it has seriously impaired my ability to write in Hindi or my mother tongue, Punjabi because most of the information giving material on important issues as well as literary writings from other languages are available only in English. Hindi and regional languages starve for want of such material. "