Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati has developed speech technology tools for healthcare information dissemination and has been working on speech technologies for North eastern languages. The tools will enable retrieval of healthcare related information with the help of Spoken Keyword Spotting (KWS) in seven North East (NE) Indian languages.
The project involves building speech technology tools for healthcare information dissemination in Hindi, English, Assamese, Bangla, Bodo, Manipuri, Khasi, Mizo, Nagamese, and Nepali.
As part of the project, a database of health-related information in seven languages spoken in North East India will be created and will facilitate the access of healthcare related information by the people in the far flung areas of North East India in their own native languages. The Centre for Linguistic Science and Technology (CLST at IIT Guwahati has got funding for this project from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India, under its ‘National Language Translation Mission (NLTM) BHASHINI’ initiative.
According to professor T G Sitharam, director, IIT Guwahati, “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.”
The Spoken Keyword Spotting (KWS) systems developed in the project will 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 the deep neural network based state-of-the-art techniques.
“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,” professor Rohit Sinha, principal Investigator of project, and head, Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, IIT Guwahati, said.
This project is part of a larger consortium project titled Speech Technologies for Indian Languages, led by IIT Madras as the consortium leader. For the North East specific project, the IIT Guwahati team will work together with research teams from Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) Kolkata, Indian Institute of Information Technology Sri City, and National Information Technology Manipur.
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