(17 August 2007 7:35 pm)

MUMBAI: Software giant IBM has developed a speech recognition software in Hindi targetted at physically challenged and less literate Hindi speakers in a bid to give them access to information using a variety of applications.

Called the 'Desktop Hindi speech recognition technology', the software has been developed by the company by jointly working with the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC).

IBM Indian research laboratory director Daniel Dias said, "The technology which helps transcribe continuous Hindi speech instantly into text form, could find use in a variety of applications like voice-enabled ATMs, car navigation systems, banking, telecom, railways and airlines."

The software is expected to enable CDAC to achieve higher level of accuracy in Hindi translation in domains like administration, finance, agriculture and the small-scale industry.

Over 75,000 Hindi words with their dialectical variations can be recognised by the software with an accuracy of range of 90 to 95 per cent. It also has an integrated spellchecker that corrects spoken-word errors.

A number of user-friendly features such as the facility to convert text to digits and decimals, date and currency format, and into fonts which could be imported to any Windows-based application are also a part of the software.