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

Kalyani (West Bengal), Jan 16 (PTI) Two institutes of the 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 their own dialects. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology (MAKAUT) said it is collaborating with Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, to bring out the app which will be used by people for free."Initially, about 12 dialects from North Bengal and South Bengal are considered for this research," the head of the MAKAUT Technology Cell, Pritimoy Sanyal, said.The whole research work is divided into two parts. One part is collecting words used on agriculture and economy in various dialects and the other one is making the computer understand them with artificial intelligence (AI), he said.After the project is complete, people can ask questions on agriculture and economy in their dialect through the app and get replies in the same dialect."This is the 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 the app."Since we are trying to include almost all Bengali dialects in this app, we may also think about those used in Bangladesh in future," Mitra said.While the majority of the Indian people are dependent on agriculture, a large part of them are not educated enough to understand information on the sector and economy available on the Internet as those are mostly in English.With the increase of digital services, development of digital technology such as speech recognition in the languages of the poor is a need of the hour, the IISc said.To solve this problem, scientists at the IISc have started a project called RESPIN with nine languages and their dialects from all over India - Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Bhojpuri, Kannada, Magadhi, Chhattisgarhi, and Maithili. MAKAUT is working on the Bengali language.The approach is to generate and collect domain-specific voice data for these nine Indian languages. This will enable technology companies to create domain-specific and language-specific voice enabled interfaces that are affordable and sufficiently accurate, the 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 they require including money transfer, making payments and reporting stolen or lost ATM," it said.The project is funded by the Gates Foundation of America. PTI COR NN NN

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

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

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