The Election Commission is all set to use a special software, Vaachak, which will enable personal computers to read out election results in Hindi and English in a clear human voice with an Indian accent.
The software will be used by the Election Commission for the first time in India during the counting process for the state elections of Bihar, Haryana and Jharkhand on February 27.
As the data from the electronic voting machines would start flowing into the central servers of the EC on February 27, the EC website would start displaying the live trends and results as they are received in real time in both English and Hindi languages.
Simultaneously, Vaachak would be converting the received information automatically into high quality, human sounding speech and deliver to the recipient as and when received.
Vaachak has been developed by Prologix Software Solutions Limited, a Lucknow-based software company, which employs latest speech technologies to convert the text into speech.
The addition of this latest technology is a part of the ongoing efforts of the EC to enhance its information delivery mechanism.
The EC’s move will enable even an illiterate and a visually challenged person to listen the latest election update through Internet. A person would have to just log on to EC website www.eci.gov.in and click to access the facility.
Vaachak was developed by Vinamra, an MBA degree holder from XLRI Jamshedpur, and his elder brother Vibhu, an IIT-Kanpur graduate in 2001 and since then they have been working to apply it in different fields and improvising its applications.
Vinamra has said that the same technology can also be used to provide information on telephone through interactive voice response system. |