For the people who are visually challenged and those who find typing difficult, a new voice based Internet browsing is introduced in local languages including English, Hindi, Urdu and Bengali. In this type of browsing, the users need to simply speak to the computer which will browse the Internet for them following the instructions and will respond to the user again in the same language. This software specially helps people in rural areas, where keyboards in regional languages are not available.
Department of information technology of the Union Government has founded this project. And the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) is developing this project which will be completed within 2 years. Automatic speech recognition software will be developed to enable a computer to recognize what has been said to it by the user.
C-DAC said that the user who wants to browse the website can speak it in front of the computer. The software which is installed in the browser will recognize the speech and convert the speech to text for processing and required information will be retrieved. The software will then convert the text on the website to speech and the computer will speak out the same for the user.