Are you one of those who have still to be part of the internet age? Do you long to be on the social networking sites? Do you long to send that elusive email which you always dreamt of? If the answer to any of the above questions is a yes, then you could be in for a treat.
The Internet age has swept across the world in just a decade or so. Today if you don’t have an email id or a presence on Facebook, you are really looked down up. But then, everyone is not as fortunate as all of us.
That’s precisely the reason; Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) is coming out with software which allows one to browse the net by simply talking to the computer. This software also encompasses the text to speech and speech to text software would prove really beneficial.
In case one wants to surf Facebook, he/she will have to just have to speak to the computer. Since the software has a speech recognition system, it will convert this speech to text and search the net on its own. Once the search is done, the answers would be given to the user in English, Hindi, Urdu or Bengali.
Simply put, there are a lot many Indians who are visually challenged or aren’t efficient in using the keyboard. Whether it’s due to the lack of computer literacy which is very low throughout the nation or due to difficulty in typing – in general, a large number of Indians do have problems in typing. And I am not talking about the urban fellows who have graduated from desktops to laptops to QWERTY phones and to iPads now.
Interestingly, there is one problem with voice processing technology. If one has to go to a particular link, it would involve traversing through a large number of layers of information before finding the correct one. But in a voice browser, one can just directly speak out the link and it would take to the particular website.
Voice based browsers though new in India have been there in the West since quite a long period of time. In addition to being helpful to you and me, it would be a pretty money-making exercise for many private players out there. One wonders whether C-DAC would share this technology with the IT behemoths or try to establish its own monopoly.
Whatever be the result, it could prove to be a boon for the thousands who have not been as lucky as us to use the Internet.
Do you think this technology will work?
