IBM was the first company to develop "speech technology" that transcribed the spoken word into text. The company’s eight research labs around the world, including the one in India, work in tandem to develop nifty new technologies that aim to make life a lot easier for people, from the BPO industry to the US military.

The company’s India Research Lab, based at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, has developed the "Real Time Language Technology", which has completed its pilot stage. And to find out what the technology was all about, I spoke to Ashish Verma, a senior researcher at the India Research Lab, who spearheaded the project. I began by asking Dr Verma, an eight-year veteran of IBM’s research lab, on the applications of the technology.

"The technology has been developed forpeople for whom English is not the first language, and therefore have a problem with pronunciation and tone of spoken English. Essentially, all Indian languages are flat, but the English language is all about inflection and tone. The technology is interactive and corrects the speaker’s pronunciation, tone, inflection, and grammar," Dr Verma said. "We see this application finding wide usage in the BPO and education sectors," he said.

The efficiency of the technology is being assessed by a human assessor. The IBM Real Time Language Technology, he said, is a Web-enabled interactive language technology for people who speak English as a "second language".

It is based on IBM’s speech recognition and other advanced speech processing techniques, and aims to help people develop their spoken language skills, largely accent-free. Dr Verma said that the technology corrected the syntax, grammar and inflection of the spoken word, enabling the speaker to come up to speed in the correct usage of the English language.

The "Real Time Language Technology" will first be deployed at the IBM Daksh facility in Gurgaon. Apart from correcting the pronunciation and tone, the technology also has voice-enabled grammar evaluation tests. Dr Verma said the tests identify areas for improvement by highlighting shortcomings and providing examples of correct pronunciation and grammar.

The language technology is based on the Windows platform, though it can be equally effective on the Linux open-source systems, he said. Earlier this month, IBM delivered a bi-directional English to Arabic translation software to U.S. forces in Iraq. The software, called Mastor (Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator) aims at improving communication between military personnel and Iraqi forces and citizens.

Can one imagine a clean Diwali with no air and noise pollution playing havoc with our anatomical existence? May be, yes, if data of Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB) are to be believed. Diwali has gotten cleaner. While the air pollution levels recorded this Diwali are still above permitted levels, the figures are much lower than those recorded last year. There has not been too much of noise pollution either, with figures remaining well under control.

GPCB attributes this decrease to a general decline in pollution levels, compounded with reports of firecracker sales reaching an all-time low and an added increased public awareness and participation. ‘‘Pollution levels are definitely going down and people are becoming more aware. More schools, residential complexes and other organisations have been advocating a pollution-free Diwali, so a drop is only natural,’’ says Sanjiv Tyagi, GPCB secretary.

On Diwali day, New Year and Bhai Bhij, air pollution level was above the level of 100 and 150 micrograms per cubic metre of Respirable Suspended Particulate Matter (RSPM) permissible in residential and industrial areas, respectively. However, it has on the whole gone down this Diwali.

For instance, in Behrampura, pollution level saw a difference as marked as 118 micrograms per cubic metre down from last year’s 162 on Diwali. Even in the usually polluted Narol-Cadilla section of town, this level did come down marginally from last year’s 197 to 185 this year. Yet there were some areas, like the LD Engineering College area, where RSPM content shot up to 172, as opposed to last year’s 159. A similar rise was noted in the RC Technical High School area in Mirzapur, where the RSPM content was 197, almost twice the permitted level. Last year’s RSPM figures for this area was 157 on Diwali.

Among the industrial areas of the city, the Odhav GIDC was the only one to register an increase in air pollution level, going from 138 last year to 192 this year. Both units at Naroda GIDC saw a decrease with one going from 103 to 82, and the other from 128 to 49. The air pollution reading in the Shardaben Hospital area showed a drop from 158 to 129 in the RSPM content.

There was no noise pollution to speak of either, with noise levels remaining well under the daily permitted mark. ‘‘These levels are different for different areas and depend on the time of day,’’ explains Tyagi, ‘‘Day time is considered between 6 am and 10 pm and 55, 65 and 75 decibels (dB) are allowed in residential, commercial and industrial areas, respectively. At night between 10 pm and 6 am, the permissible values go down to 45, 55 and 70, respectively.’’ He further informs that the rules are slightly different for Diwali, when ‘‘the noise limit for fireworks is 125 dB at a distance of four metres from the explosion’’. He insists that Diwali this time was ‘‘peaceful’’. ‘‘I could even sleep through the night,’’ he quips.

The loudest part of the city was Dilli Darwaja with 101 dB, measured at about 7 pm on October 20. Maninagar has been recorded as the quietest, with both LG corner and railway overbridge registering 72 dB. Last year, noise levels in the city had ranged from 79 in Navrangpura and Memnagar to 108 dB at the Bajaj showroom near Gandhi Ashram.

Source: Expressindia.com