HUBBALLI: Spoken Hindi conversation module as part of the Autonomous Navigating Humanoid application has been developed by the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Dharwad and soon, it will be used in robots to serve in geriatrics and patient care applications in the country.
The IIIT Dharwad with Technology Incubation Hub on Autonomous Navigation and Data Acquisition (TiHAN), Invento Robotics and other firms have taken up the Autonomous Navigating Humanoid project and it will add more features to Mitra robots. With few changes, the developed humanoid can be deployed in different service sectors too. TiHAN has funded `70 lakh for the project. Initially, spoken Hindi conversation has been developed as part of the project.
Prof 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 along with IIT Dharwad, IIT Hyderabad and IIT Bhubaneswar will jointly develop the module. A senior professor said that they have developed text-to-speech models for Lambani, Soliga and Kui languages, and soon it will be developed in the Mundari language. After gathering more details on the tribal languages, speech to speech module will be developed, he added.