As part of its ongoing efforts towards overcoming the language barrier to computing, Microsoft India today showcased a host of custom made solutions for the Indian market. The solutions and tools include:
-- Language Interface Packs (LIPs) in 12 Indian languages - Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Hindi, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Tamil and Telugu - for MS Office & Windows. A total of 45 additional soft (virtual) keyboards, which are free to download, are also available in these 12 languages.
-- Windows Live, which includes e-mail, Instant Messenger, online storage, photo gallery, social networking, calendar, online storage, personal home page, and more, in seven Indian languages. The languages are Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu.
-- In Microsoft's most significant initiative to reach out to Indic developers, the Captions Language Interface Pack (or CLIP) has been launched for Hindi, Malayalam, Oriya, and Tamil. CLIP is a tool that uses a tooltip caption to display translations for user interface items in Visual Studio 2008. This is the first time Microsoft has released a tool specifically to help students and beginner developers in India use the product in their own language.
-- The Microsoft India Development Centre demonstrated an alpha version of a tool that helps the user to enter text in nine Indian languages in any text box on most websites. The languages are Bengali, Hindi, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil and Telugu.
-- Microsoft Research India works on technologies that span multiple languages. Research projects showcased today were IL-POST (an annotation framework for Indian languages), wikiBABEL (a community-oriented multilingual content creation portal) and MINT (an algorithm for mining multilingual news corpora). These projects are aimed at creating resources to enable computational linguistics research in Indian languages.
A highlight of the showcase was a peek at the beta version of Windows 7 in Hindi, one of the eight global languages the Operating System (Beta) was released in recently.
Prof U N Singh, Director, Central Institute of Indian Languages, chalked out the challenges in localizing computing, and compelling imperatives for doing so. "By 2016, India will have a population of 500 million with less than five years of schooling, and another 300 million not passing out of high school. A knowledge society will be impossible unless we find innovative means of reaching these people. Localizing a mass-based and mass-use software could be a positive step forward that will have a far-reaching effect and impact", he said.
The collection of tools and solutions introduced by Microsoft India today are an attempt to cater to and enable the 95 percent Indians who still prefer their local language more than English in their work and personal life.
Commenting on the need for language computing to enable mass IT usage in India, Ravi Venkatesan, Chairman, Microsoft India, said, "Each one of us knows of at least a few people who would benefit from ICT if language wasn't a barrier - our parents, the neighborhood grocery store owner, the policeman at the local station, the farmer you see when you travel to the villages - the list is endless. The language barrier is an added challenge towards providing access to information to a huge number of Indians - and thereby having them participate in India's growth curve. Microsoft, under its global Unlimited Potential effort, aims to deliver computing through accessible, relevant and affordable solutions. Localization issues are a huge factor where accessibility is concerned, and as a global industry leader, we believe Microsoft has a responsibility and the resources to make some difference."
Microsoft has been working on language computing in India since 1998, since the first India visit of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. The idea was to usher in the IT revolution in the country in a phased manner - and localization was identified as the key catalyst for effecting this development. In 2003, Microsoft India launched Project Bhasha, a cohesive effort to bring together governments, the academia and research institutions, the local ISVs and developers and the industry associations on a common ground for promoting local language usage in IT. The www.bhashaindia.com portal is India's leading community for Indian language computing.
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