Evaluation of Plan Schemes of the Department of Official Language

SHRUTLEKHAN
Shrutlekhan is a speech recognition software that converts Hindi
speech into Hindi text. It is also a tool of the MANTRA system to correct the
translated text. Its development was included as a plan scheme in the third
year of the Tenth plan. The C-DAC partnered with IBM to develop the
software and announced its development in August, 2007.
The software understands and transcribes speech with minimal use of the
keyboard and generates a stream of text after processing. People less
comfortable with computers can therefore use it. It also eliminates the need
to learn different keyboard mapping, a problem arising due to the usage of
various keyboards in Indian languages. It is also speaker independent and
comes with a spell-checker facility. Other user-friendly features include
conversion of text to numbers, date and currency formats. The output is in
UNICODE, a universally accepted font, with a facility to convert the text into
ISFOC fonts to enable the user to import the text to any Windows based
applications.
The system requirements for the software include a microphone, Windows
2000/XP operating system and Indic enabled Language setting option of the
operating system. The study team noted in a small trial that the software is
fairly accurate and versatile. It is however early days and the professional
users’ feedback would be necessary before passing a judgement. But there
can be no denial that this technology has an enormous future with possible
applications ranging from ATM kiosks, to security and even vehicle
navigation systems. It also can save on time and enhance the accuracy of
Hindi documents. So far, however, its usage has been extremely limited
with the C-DAC informing the evaluation team that only 500 copies of the
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