Chennai: A speech recognition technology for Hindi has been developed by software major IBM which would help less literate and physically challenged persons among the speakers of the language,access information through a variety of applications.

The Desktop Hindi Speech Recognition Technology developed by the IBM India Software Lab in collaboration with Centre for Development of Advanced Computing(C-DAC) would provide a natural interface for human-computer interaction.

The technology which helps transcribe continuous Hindi speech instantly into text form, could find use in a variety of applications like voice-enabled ATMs, car navigation systems, banking, telecom, railways and airlines, said Dr Daniel Dias, Director, IBM India Research Laboratory.

The system can recognise more than 75,000 Hindi words with dialetical variations, providing an accuracy level of 90-95%, he said.

A spellchecker to correct spoken-word errors also enhances the accuracy.

The technology also has integrated many user-friendly features such as facility to convert text to digits and decimals, date and currency format, and into fonts which could be imported to any windows-based application.

“IBM believes in taking high-end research to the benefit of the masses and bridging the digital divide through a faster diffusion process,” Dias said.

The technology also would enable C-DAC to ensure high-level accuracy in Hindi translation in a host of domains including administration, finance, agriculture and small scale industry.