Telugus of Silicon Valley are lobbying with IT giant Google to set up a centre for Asian Languages in Visakhapatnam.

Software technocrat and Silicon Andhra founder Kuchibhotla Anand told The Hindu that talks had already been initiated with the managers of Google to explore the feasibility of establishing a centre of Asian Languages in Visakhapatnam. A decision on it would have to taken at the vice-presidents level, he said.

The setting up of a centre for Asian Languages would help in deploying the best available technology for digitising languages, he said.

Mr Anand, who is well established in the Silicon Valley, was recently nominated as chairman of the Kuchipudi Natyaramam and took charge in the Andhra Pradesh Secretariat on Thursday.

‘Ahead of Tamil’

He said Silicon Andhra was collaborating with Google to create new open source Unicode fonts for Telugu. Various search engines could not recognise the font unless it was Unicode compliant. Though the Telugus were 14 years behind the Tamils in becoming Internet savvy, the language at present was “two steps ahead” of Tamil in the development of Unicode fonts.

Two Google open source Telugu Fonts named after N.T. Rama Rao (NTR) and former Minister who held the first World Telugu Conference Mandali Venkatakrishna Rao (Mandali) were very popular and being downloaded by Internet users all over the world. Google had 18 Telugu fonts on its list, more fonts than any other Indian language, he said.

Google was also developing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software for Telugu. Once the software was available, text file could be created by simply scanning the page of a book.

Software for converting speech to text and vice versa was also coming soon, Mr Anand said.

The setting up of a centre for Asian Languages will help in deploying the best available technology for digitising languages

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Vijayawada / by G. Venkataramana Rao / Vijayawada – February 28th, 2015