This gives speakers access to gadgets that use AI enabled speech recognition
Personal digital assistants can soon ‘converse’ with you in Telugu, and with a greater level of accuracy. For, the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Hyderabad has embarked on an ambitious project of crowdsourcing at least 2,000 hours of speech in this language that could be used in such devices.
According to Prakash Yalla from IIIT’s Technology Transfer Office, the move comes after talks between various organisations and the Centre.
Around ₹1 crore has been earmarked for the project. The initiative seeks to give a large number of speakers of regional languages, such as Telugu, access to gadgets that use Artificial Intelligence enabled speech recognition such as Siri or Alexa.
January 07, 2021
For English and Hindi speaking gadget users, tools like Siri, Alexa, and the Google Assistant come in handy. From culling out phone numbers, making calls, and getting answers for search queries, these artificial intelligence-based solutions have emerged as virtual secretaries.
It is not the same case with the users in regional languages. The basic problem is scarcity of voice data samples in the databases. “You need to have datasets containing speech is crucial. In order to address this challenge, we have launched a pilot with a set of users,” an executive of International Institute of Information of Technology (IIIT-H) said.