Next time when you convert text to speech in an Indian language on Indus OS based smartphone, don’t forget to thanks Hema Murthy.
Meet Hema Murthy who made this conversion possible on a smartphone and this is a result of 15 years of hardwork.
Indus OS collaborated with Department of Electronics and IT in 2015 and worked with Murthy, who spent her mornings to make text to speech synthesis possible for 8 Indian languages.
ET reported Rakesh Deshmukh, CEO, Indus OS was in the search of a similar speech platform which would further enhance the localized operating system.
Their partnership resulted in a product called Indus Reader, which is used in smartphones manufactured by Micromax, Celkon, Karbonn and Swipe among others.
Professor Murthy, a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Madras, has been interested in speech processing and synthesis and this belief helped her develop TTS in Indian languages using open source platform.
“Considering the vast variety of Indian languages and how each language is different from one another, I thought why not have devices or platforms which can translate English text to speech in any Indian language,” she told ET.
“Indo-Aryan class of languages shares certain distinct common features. A lot of speech sounds have been borrowed from each language. So we developed a common phone set to work on,” said Murthy.
But, majority of the people are not aware of the research.
After signing the MOU, Indus OS made the necessary changes on the platform for the Indian user. “Indus OS team has a long-term vision of taking Indian languages through the mobile platform in rural areas. This was really an opportunity to mass-proliferate the TDIL developed technologies,” says Lata.
Source : Business Insider
