VELLORE: Farmers’ Buddy, an end-to-end application to assist the farmers, developed by Rahul Sanghi, a final year B Tech Computer Science Engineering student of VIT University, has bagged the Most Innovative and Creative Project Award in the fourth Annual Student Speech Application Contest for the year 2009-2010 that was conducted by the Applied Voice Input Output Society (AVIOS).
The contest conducted in California, USA, in April this year was aimed at providing opportunities for students to innovate, design and create practical applications using advanced speech technology. While it attracted the participation of students from many countries, Rahul’s was the only entry outside the US to bag an award this year. He received a cash prize of $ 1,000.
Speaking about his project, Rahul said it was always his dream to make optimum use of technology to solve issues faced by the global population. He narrowed down to agriculture when he realised that farmers suffered from inadequate knowledge transfer due to their inability to access the latest technology.
According to him, Farmer’s Buddy (FB) is a next-generation voice-enabled (multimodal) agriculture portal that provides solutions to small farmers and agriculture students of India with an endeavour to organise all necessary data on a common portal using a touch screen-based kiosk.
A real time pilot project would be launched by mid-June this year, he added.