Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati is developing the “SPEECH TECHNOLOGY FOR NORTH-EAST LANGUAGES” project to develop speech technology tools for dissemination of health-related information. The tool will enable retrieval of health information in seven North East Indian languages with the help of Spoken Keyword Spotting.
Highlighting the unique aspects of this project, Prof Sitaram, Director, IIT Guwahati said,- This work is a symbol of IIT Guwahati’s commitment to work for the local languages and castes of Northeast India.
The Centre for Linguistics and Technology (CLST) at IIT Guwahati has received funding for this project from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India under its “NATIONAL LANGUAGE TRANSLATION MISSION, BHASINI” initiative. The interdisciplinary nature of the project and focus on local languages reflects the spirit envisaged in the National Policy on Education, 2020.
A database of health information will also be created in seven languages spoken in North East India as part of the project. The project is expected to facilitate access to health information in remote areas of Northeast India to people in their native languages, the institute said.
IIT Guwahati said in a statement that the project involves creating speech technology tools for dissemination of health information in Hindi, English, Bodo, Manipuri, Assamese, Bengali, Khasi, Nagami, Mizo, and Nepali.
The Spoken Keyword Spotting (KWS) system developed in the project will be able to locate a list of predefined words in a given speech signal from one of the project’s target languages. Endeavours will include modelling speech with state-of-the-art techniques based on deep neural networks.
Professor Sinha also mentioned that the Centre for Linguistics and Technology (CLST) was a unique and truly interdisciplinary centre dedicated to analysis and technology development in the languages of Northeast India through research projects and its PhD programme.
Elaborating on the project, Professor R Sinha, Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, IIT Guwahati, said – The institute is committed to develop such devices which will provide last mile connectivity and information access to various communities living in the North East region will facilitate dissemination in their own languages. This project will be a step towards achieving that goal.
