Monday, July 15, 2002		Feature

Click before you speak
Peeyush Agnihotri

Aditya Tandon

WHAT does a teacher do when one of the students embarrasses him in front of the class by correcting the tutor's pronunciation? Either the slighted teacher snubs the student for correcting him publicly or buys a latest phonetic thesaurus available in the market to work on the diction. In some cases, he does both.

Aditya Tandon (25), a teacher in a computer institute, however, reacted differently. After one of his students interjected to correct him, Aditya successfully developed software that uses actual human voice segments to provide intelligent and human sounding pronunciation. The software, Accent Plus, is a multilingual speech synthesis program that uses speech segments like syllables and large phoneme sequences providing unlimited vocabulary.

It also works the other way round. Type any word to know its meaning, its equivalent in any of the four languages and its pronunciation. The document reader converts computer text to natural sounding voice for the supported languages.

The software has a dictionary of English (both UK and US), French, Italian and Spanish languages and has an interactive animated parrot, which talks to the users. The choice of this animation character was but natural, as parrots are known to be endowed with the gift of the gab.

"I plan to incorporate six other languages, including Russian, German and Japanese, in this software," Aditya trills. This Cambridge University diploma holder, who is also an MCSD and MCP, is pursuing his MCA simultaneously. It took him three months to develop this software with bare minimum resources and he used Visual Basic as the medium.

Text to Speech (TTS) aspect of programming is Aditya's favourite. Ask him anything and he reels off the TTS history interspersed with nerdy jargon.

Making programs is nothing new for this son of a personnel manager (his father works for SCL, SAS Nagar). Earlier, Aditya had developed programs for his personal use that included simulation of his computer exams, maintenance of personal budget, etc. This time, however, he plans to go commercial and has even applied for a licence from Microsoft. "If I get permission from them I'll price the CD for just Rs 250," he says.

About future plans? The philanthropist streak in this young man comes to the fore when he says that he wants to work to make a speech synthesis and recognition software for the blind.

Aditya is also developing voice-enabled systems that could make our daily life tasks easier. "I plan to develop a program whereby the user just has to order a door to shut or for that matter a light to turn on. Or maybe, to lock a house through voice command. For all this he is looking for corporate support and sponsorship. Buona Fortuna, giovane!