IIIT-Dharwad’s humanoid can speak Hindi

The module will soon be used in robots to serve in geriatrics and patient care applications in the country. As of now, speech-to-speech translation module is being developed for four tribal languages of Karnataka and Odisha.

The Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Dharwad has developed spoken Hindi conversation module as part of the Autonomous Navigating Humanoid application, said a report published in The New Indian Express. 

The module will soon be used in robots to serve in geriatrics and patient care applications in the country. The developed humanoid can be deployed in different service sectors too with minor changes. Technology Incubation Hub on Autonomous Navigation and Data Acquisition (TiHAN) has funded INR 70 lakh for the project. Initially, spoken Hindi conversation has been developed as part of the project. 

KT Deepak from IIIT Dharwad said in the developed Spoken Hindi Conversation module, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) and a Text to Speech Synthesis (TTS) have been included. Using this module, one can converse with the humanoid in the Hindi language. 

There are plans to develop the same application in other languages also. As of now, speech-to-speech translation module is being developed for four tribal languages. Two tribal languages of Karnataka, namely Lambani and Soliga, and two from Odisha - Kui and Mundari - have been selected under the speech-to-speech translation module, which is being funded by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). 

IIIT Dharwad, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Bhubaneswar to jointly develop module 

IIIT Dharwad along with IIT Dharwad, IIT Hyderabad and IIT Bhubaneswar will jointly develop the module. A professor at IIIT Dharwad said they have developed text-to-speech models for Lambani, Soliga and Kui languages, and soon it will be developed in the Mundari language. 

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