Language is not a barrier

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Photograph from the Internet

To type in Bengali, Hindi or Nepali, you don’t need to be a scholar
By Mathures Paul

In a few years time, you don’t need to know English to be on the web. Every major IT company is spending large amounts to develop interfaces in various languages. Using artificial intelligence structure most of these interfaces are being developed. A leader in the area is Tachyon Technologies and its Quillpad. You don’t need to know how to write Bengali or Hindi or Nepali or Punjabi to use Quillpad.
On www.quillpad.in simply choose a language you want the text matter to be in and start typing in English. To be more specific, users spell out words of local languages phonetically in Roman letters, and Quillpad’s predictive engine converts them into other scripts. If you are unsure of the pronunciation of a word, simply right click and a list of alternatives is provided.
Launched in 2000, it took KS Sreeram and Ram Prakash almost four years of planning and visualizing various ideas. Quillpad allows one to type in 10 languages ~ Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi and Nepali. It’s web-based and is now online with e-mail and Internet search features. Some of Tachyon’s clients are Rediff Mail and iLand, Ibibo, Indiatimes, Guruji, Fropper and OnMobile. Ram Prakash speaks to The Statesman.

How does one convert anything that’s typed online into SMS?
Quillpad online solutions is different from Quillpad mobile solution. Mobile solution can be installed on handsets directly and one can use Quillpad to type SMSes in Indian languages.

Configuration of mobile phones to use Quillpad...
Quillpad will work or ported on to any device that has Indian language font. Today, most devices released in the market come with Devanagari font support.

During election, has there been an increase in usage of Quillpad?
We have seen that since February usage on Quillpad site has doubled. We are not sure if that is in any way correlated to election-related usage.

Profile of customers using the product...
We have people using Quillpad for sending e-mails, writing blogs, chatting, sending greetings in their mother tongue, etc. Apart from these, there are a lot of serious users and reporters writing long articles, local business people writing their business communications and also an instance of a novelist using Quillpad for writing her novel.

What is the strength of the various vernacular dictionaries you are using?
Quillpad does not use any dictionary. Instead, we use statistically learnt language patterns. Thus, even when people type some non-dictionary words, like names or words that never appeared in the training corpus, Quillpad can most of the time apply the patterns it has learnt from other words to intelligently transliterate the names. Quillpad training for a given language does not require any special training data nor does it require human language experts to design patterns or rules. Quillpad technology can learn to predict any alphabet-based language in the world, not just Indian languages, within a matter of hours.

Can the interface be incorporated into operating systems…
Quillpad can be integrated into operating systems as easily as it can be integrated with mobile platforms. It is only a matter of intentions and priorities of the operating system developers to work with us.

Pricing…
Quillpad has been currently licensed to several websites and mobile handset manufacturers on annual licensing/royalty models. We are soon opening Quillpad API that can be purchased online. This API will be free for non-commercial websites.

(To get a feel of Quillpad, visit www.quillpad.in)

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