Vaachak is a text to speech engine for Indian languages that has been the preferred choice for speech application developers in India for several years now. Developed by Prologix ( www.prologixsoft.com ), the product has a successful track record of integrating with a wide variety of IT applications in India – a challenging task to say the least. It also received the national award for Innovative technology in 2005, for its contribution towards enabling accessibility tools in Indian languages.

Our goal is to build voices and personas for all major Indian languages; we say “major” and not “official” because in India, language is truly a continuum and this requires going well beyond the list of “official languges” in the country. In order to make Information truly accessible to everyone, it is required to carry out voice development using an innovative approach that leverages the talent and diversity that is distributed across the community of speech developers and users in India. We are presently thinking about mechanisms that allow us to take our voice development skills and tools to the community.

As a first step to showcase the possibilities that emerge with “speech enablement”, we have setup an application that allows a user to listen to Hindi content inside a browser (http://vaachak.mla.iitk.ac.in/VaachakSite). In the coming weeks, this application will support Indian accented English and Bengali; other languages will follow. We sincerely hope that this will become an interesting visiting place for people who like browsing through Indian language content. We are eager to hear suggestions, comments and criticisms!

Team Vaachak @ Prologix