Indian Government Launches A Web Based Optical OCR and Text to Speech System

A new system to make it easy to handle different language to for people from different linguistic background, Indian Govt has launched a new web based Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system for Hindi and Punjabi language. Its was officially launched by  Sachin Pilot, Indian Minister of State for Communications and Information Technology.

They also launched a CD containing Text – To – Speech System (TTS) in six Indian languages. These are Hindi, Marathi, Bangla, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam. According to Sachin Pilot, "This initiative will be a significant move towards the digital inclusion of differently-abled people from various linguistic backgrounds. Optical Character Recognition systems convert paper documents to electronic form so that printed books and records can be accessed and processed using computer based techniques and Text-to-Speech is computer software which renders the machine readable text into Human Voice."
Sachin Pilot hoped that it will also pave the way for wider usage of Indian languages in governance applications. OCR for Indian scripts can make this literature web accessible.

OCR is a process through which handwritten, typewritten, or printed text is converted to electronic form. This will allow editing of printed books and documents, searching for any specific word/phrase, and also implementing techniques like machine translation or text-to-speech on it. OCR system convert paper documents to electronic form so that printed books and records can be accessed and processed using computer based techniques.

At the event, Sachin Pilot also launched a text-to-speech system across six languages: Hindi, Marathi, Bangla, Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam. This effectively means that developers can now finally integrate this system in their software and users can listen to regional books and documents on any device which supports text-to-speech technology i.e. mobile phones, e-book readers, tablets, computers, and so on. Also, if the device sports a screen reader, users will be able to easily navigate and perform basic operations on it.

Although OCR's are available for English and other languages, reliable OCR's for Indian scripts were not available. A consortium mode project under TDIL was initiated to overcome this technology gap. The consortium under the leadership of IIT Delhi has been able to develop OCR's for a number of Indian scripts.
You can get more info about OCR and other downloadable contests like screen reader at TDIL Data Centre homepage.

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