Guwahati: The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati is developing a project ‘Speech Technologies for North Eastern Languages’ to develop speech technology tools for healthcare information dissemination.
The tools will enable the retrieval of healthcare-related information with the help of spoken keyword spotting (KWS) in seven Northeast Indian languages.
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This project involves building speech technology tools for healthcare information dissemination in Hindi, English, Assamese, Bangla, Bodo, Manipuri, Khasi, Mizo, Nagamese, and Nepali, the IIT Guwahati said in a statement.
As part of the project, a database of health-related information in seven languages spoken in the Northeast will also be created.
This project is expected to facilitate access to healthcare-related information by the people in the far-flung areas of the Northeast in their own native languages, said IIT Guwahati.
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The Centre for Linguistic Science and Technology (CLST) at IIT Guwahati has got funding for this project from the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, under its ‘National Language Translation Mission (NLTM): BHASHINI’ initiative, it said.
Highlighting the unique aspects of this Project, Prof T G Sitharam, Director, IIT Guwahati, said, “This work embodies IIT Guwahati’s commitment to work for the local languages and ethnicities of North East India. The interdisciplinary nature of the project and the focus on local languages reflect the spirit envisaged in the National Education Policy, 2020.”
Prof Rohit Sinha, Principal Investigator of the project, and Head, Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, IIT Guwahati, said, “The Institute is committed to developing tools that will facilitate last-mile connectivity and information dissemination to the various communities living in the NE area, in their own languages. This project will be a step towards achieving that aim.”
Prof Sinha also mentioned that the Centre for Linguistic Science and Technology (CLST) was a unique and truly interdisciplinary centre that is devoted to the analysis and technology development in the languages of North East India, through research projects and its PhD programme.
The Spoken Keyword Spotting (KWS) systems developed in the project will be able to detect a list of predefined words in a given speech signal of one of the target languages of the project.
The efforts will involve modelling speech with deep neural network-based state-of-the-art techniques.