Chhatisgarh: Now, tribals can listen to news in their own Gondi language

RAIPUR: In a bid to create awareness among state's tribal population, and keep them up to date with everyday happenings, an Adivasi Radio mobile app has been launched at International Institute of Information Technology Naya Raipur (IIIT-NR) in Naya Raipur on Tuesday.
Based on Text-to-Speech (TTS) technology, the android app will read out news articles and would also translate them into Gondi language as it is highly spoken among tribals.This way, it will cater to wider tribal population as a lot of them still find difficulty with hindi and other languages, thus missing out on daily newspapers.
Microsoft Research, IIIT-NR students, and CGnet Swara Foundation have jointly developed the application.
During the inaugural event, IIIT-NR Director Pradeep Sinha said, " We are trying to use technology to benefit tribals. A lot of the work was done by our students under the guidance of the Microsoft team".
The team has now started to work on creating a machine translation tool between Gondi and other languages. An incubation centre at IIIT was also inaugurated for the purpose today. As a first step, a team from CGnet Swara - a non-profit media organization, has translated 10,000 sentences from Hindi to Gondi. It will now be fed to computers. Students of IIIT Naya Raipur will work closely with researchers from Microsoft on this project.
On the occasion, Kalika Bali from Microsoft Research said, "I believe that technology can empower marginalized communities in different ways. Adivasi Radio is a significant step towards enabling the community through language technology."
Shubhranshu Choudhary from CGnet Swara Foundation too had a similar view on the project. "It is a unique opportunity where three institutions have come together to work for not only the country's most deprived community, but also suppressed due to ongoing political violence. I hope this association will help towards bringing long cherished peace in the region."