According to Rajeev Sangal, Director of IIIT, the project, which has been funded by the Ministry of Information Technology, will be ready in the next two years. "You can talk to the mobile phone. Suppose, anybody does not know reading or writing, they can dictate the phone the SMS, which they would like to send. They should be able to speak it out and then the phone will convert it into text and send it as a message," Sangal told PTI.
According to him, seven other institutions are currently working on this project. Sangal said, the technology will be useful in mobile phones, which have smaller screens and keyboard, making it difficult to type letters.
The speech lab of the IIIT aims to develop robust speech systems for applications, such as speech translation, phonetic engine for Indian languages, speaker recognition for biometrics, and dialog systems in speech mode, a senior faculty member said.
Speaking about other projects currently the institute is working upon, Sangal said, the research teams are also engaged in developing an optical character reader for mobile phones.
"The optical character reader will read whatever is written on the screen with the help of a handwriting recognition tool. We can write the instructions in any Indian languages on a mobile phone, using a stylus. The text will be recognised by the cell-phone and action can be taken accordingly," the academician explained.
The institute has also developed a software for an international mobile maker that would read out the SMSs in Hindi, Sangal said, without naming the mobile maker`s name.
According to analysts, this technology is useful to expand in to rural Indian markets where mobile penetration is still in the nascent stage due to higher levels of illiteracy.
Last year, former President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam launched machine translation (MT) systems, which facilitates web-based language translation, developed by IIIT along with 16 other institutions.