KOCHI: Bhashamithram, a mobile application launched by Centre for Development of Imaging Technology (C-DIT) is gaining popularity among the youth who want to enrich their Malayalam vocabulary.
Launched last week by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, the app has attracted over 10,000 downloads so far from the Google Playstore. The app has a user rating of 4.7 out of 5.
At present the app gives English-Malayalam, Malayalam-English dictionaries and a thesaurus for Malayalam. It has a database for 1,40,000 words, out of which the Malayalam equivalent for 99,003 English words are available.
Similarly 63,000 English words for Malayalam and thesaurus for 9,000 Malayalam words are good enough to help an average user. For each Malayalam word there is at least four synonyms available, said head of Research and Development Division, C-Dit, V Govindaru.
The application is based on the Bhashamithram dictionary developed by C-Dit and Kerala State IT Mission in 2009. The web application became an instant hit among Non Resident Keralites. “In a month we got 1.3 lakh hits from countries such as United States of America and Germany. It clearly shows the demand for an authentic online dictionary,” said Govindaru. According to him, C-Dit retained the lexical features of the dictionary and removed the grammatical features during the development of the mobile application.
C-Dit plans to add more features in the app. Those who are not comfortable with using Malayalam keyboard will be provided with a ‘Manglish’ one. English voice command works for the web application. However users will have wait for features such as Malayalam speech-to-text. It also plans to add new words to the database every six months. “This is done to include oft used contemporary Malayalam words,” said Govindaru.
A similar project to create a portal to learn Malayalam by C-Dit is yet to take off. It was started with assistance from Norka nine years ago.
It has a database for 1,40,000 words.