QuillPad – Taking English to Indic Transliteration one step ahead

For those who have read my earlier posts on Avro Keyboard and Google’s Indic Transliteration service, here comes a pleasant surprise for you. Tachyon Technologies – an Indian software firm brings to you QuillPad, a really advanced online (and free) English to Indic transliteration tool.

The interface is pretty similar to Google’s Indic Transliteration page. You have this text-box where you key in words of the Indic language of your choice using English (based on the phoenetics of the word) and they instantaneously get converted to words in the corresponding script. Where you’re unsure about how to spell a word in English, Google offers you pop-up suggestions. QuillPad takes this one step further by automatically inserting words that come closest (spelling-wise) to the words you’re trying to type. There’s probably a pretty powerful dictionary search algorithm working silently behind the scene. And then there are the pop-ups too, in case their auto-spelling mechanism cannot spot the right word for you.

Lets take for example, the Bengali word জিনিস, which means things or stuff. This would be spelt as jinis in English. Minus the ‘s’, the word would spell as jini (or যিনি) which means who. As long as you’ve typed up to jini, the transliteration tool spells out who, starting with a য. The moment you add the ‘s’ at the end, the য gets magically transformed into the correct জ. This means that you don’t need to follow any hard and fast transliteration rules. You can fire away at the keyboard in a totally casual way and yet come out with a document that gets a perfect A for spelling.

Another cool feature of QuillPad is automatic transliteration of common English words that have migrated to the Indic vocabulary. A sizeable bunch of English words are found in our colloquial tongue and for many of them there aren’t any counterparts in the Indic languages to convey the correct connotation. Such words are used as they are. With QuillPad in action, you won’t have to grope around to figure out the correct phoenetics. The AI engine automatically does that for you.

QuillPad supports a large selection of Indic languages. That includes Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali & Gujarati. QuillPad also supplies the engine that powers Rediffmail and Rediff Bol.

If you own a site in any of the major Indian languages, QuillPad may be able to help you out on the Searh end. They offer a Indic Search Widget for websites which sure can come in handy.

All in all, this is one awesome example of coding that needs to be checked out immediately.