App under development to help people know about agriculture in dialects of Bengal

Kalyani (West Bengal), Jan 16 (PTI) Two institutes of country have teamed up to develop a speech recognition app that will help less educated people of West Bengal understand different aspects of agriculture and economy in ir own dialects.

Maulana Abul Kalam Az University of Technology (MAKAUT) said it is collaborating with Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, to bring out app which will be used by people for free.

"Initially, about 12 dialects from North Bengal and South Bengal are considered for this research," he of MAKAUT Technology Cell, Pritimoy Sanyal, said.

whole research work is divided into two parts. One part is collecting words used on agriculture and economy in various dialects and or one is making computer understand m with artificial intelligence (AI), he said.

After project is complete, people can ask questions on agriculture and economy in ir dialect through app and get replies in same dialect.

"This is first such work on Bengali dialects," Sanyal said.

MAKAUT Vice-Chancellor Saikat Maitra said that a committee with experts in Bengali language has been formed to help scientists develop app.

"Since we are trying to include almost all Bengali dialects in this app, we may also think about those used in Banglesh in future," Mitra said.

While majority of Indian people are dependent on agriculture, a large part of m are not educated enough to understand information on sector and economy available on Internet as those are mostly in English.

With increase of digital services, development of digital technology such as speech recognition in languages of poor is a need of hour, IISc said.

To solve this problem, scientists at IISc have started a project called RESPIN with nine languages and ir dialects from all over India - Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Bhojpuri, Kanna, Maghi, Chhattisgarhi, and Maithili. MAKAUT is working on Bengali language.

approach is to generate and collect domain-specific voice data for se nine Indian languages. This will enable technology companies to create domain-specific and language-specific voice enabled interfaces that are affordable and sufficiently accurate, Bangalore-based institute said on RESPIN.

"Speech recognition in Indian languages can potentially help illiterate Indians to use digital financial services by simply asking aloud for a service y require including money transfer, making payments and reporting stolen or lost ATM," it said.

project is funded by Gates Foundation of America. PTI COR NN NN