Intel-IIT venture for speech technology

Intel India's technology centre and the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, have announced a joint initiative -- they have established a speech laboratory to promote research into speech technology. The aim is to develop software systems in speech technology.

Intel will sponsor a five year research project for developing a phonetic engine for speech in Indian languages. M Tech and B Tech students will work on speech technology projects at the speech lab while MS and PhD scholars will work on specific topics oriented towards speech technology.

The speech lab was inaugurated by U R Rao, chairman of the governing body of IIT Madras and member of India's Space Commission. Sivakumar Ramamurthy, director, Intel Technology Centre, was also present.

Prof. Rao underlined the importance of speech recognition technology, especially in the Indian context. He also noted how the developments in speech and image analysis and speech automatic translation were the outcome of the revolutions in chip technology. He said, "the development of highly sophisticated algorithms has refined analysis, recognition and identification of speech, and made it a primary tool of authentication."

Mr Sivakumar pointed out how speech recognition enables people to access the Internet without having to learn to input non-English languages through a keyboard. The laboratory will have the latest hardware (500 MHz and above) to work on -- Pentium III based workstations, Xeon and Pentium III based servers.

Intel established the Intel Technology Centre in 1996 to work with software developers, system integrators, technologists and academia to share Intel's technology and expertise. Intel has already established five labs in India at the IITs in Delhi, Mumbai, and Chennai, at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and the National Centre for Software Technology in Mumbai.