Web biggies wooing Indian web surfers

There is a popular Hindi adage that when translated to the best of my abilities goes, "When God showers goodies on you, he will give enough for your roof top to cave in"

Thats exactly what flashed to my mind as I had been surfing for the latest tech news during the past week. Google, Yahoo and IBM, three of the web's big players have been wooing Indian netizens with India-centric online offerings.

Google has release two new language offerings.

One is the Google Indic Transliteration that allows users to type in English and the software does the transliteration to Hindi on the fly.

The software is still in its beta and has been opened to the public to receive and improve upon feedback. The software is similar to a T9 input on a mobile that offers word suggestions both in English and Hindi.

Two, the Indic On-Screen Keyboard iGoogle Gadget which too is on beta testing. Primarily targeted at users who would like to perform Google searches in Indic laguages, the tool is available in the form of a Google homepage gadget. It plans to support 15 Indian languages eventually.

Yahoo too has plans up its sleeves for Indian users. It launched 7 language specific portals in the first quarter of this year.
It extended the same language feature to its hugely popular desktop messenger tool as a plugin. Its also plans to incorporate the ability to send mails in upto 7 different Indian languages into its e-mail by the end of 2007.

IBM, another big web player in recent years plans to go a step further and incorporate speech recognition technologies. Hindi speaking people can effortlessly create emails or documents by speaking it out. The plan for the future is to incorporate this speech recognition technology into IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems like ATMs, Service Kiosks, Billy Payment systems, ticketing systems, etc.

The Desktop Hindi Speech Recognition Technology is developed by the IBM India Software Lab in collaboration with Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC)

The system recognises more than 75,000 Hindi words with dialectical variations and provides an accuracy level of 90-95 per cent. A spellchecker enhances accuracy by adding the ability to correct spoken-word errors.

Rejoice Indian Netizens.....Goodies falling all around you .....