Technology For Society

Indic input standards development for smart touch phones

2011-03-19T02:33:00.000-07:00

Though, the Indic language support in basic phones existed from 2005, their usage is close to nil, due to lack of awareness, difficulties of entering Indic text and printing of Hindi characters on keypads meant for non -Hindi areas. For Indic use in SMS, there were no standards for encoding Indic text with GSM/CDMA technology.

IEEE-Standards Association has setup a India Special Interest Group with the objective of spearheading the initiative to improve the contribution from Indian engineers in Standards development. As part of its software and IT sub group, a meeting was organised at Centre for Internet and Society(CIS), Bangalore to understand the status of Indic on mobiles and brainstorm next steps on 24 Feb 2011.

Dr Nadeem from CEWIT, Vijay from Nokia, Dr Mahesh and Naveen J from Brahmi computing,Sunil Abraham and Nirmita Narasimhan, Sri Chandra and myself as volunteers of IEEE-SA attended the meeting. Sri Chandra briefed the participants about the IEEE-SA initiative.

Dr Nadeem presented work done as part of the broadband consortium during the last year towards input, storage, rendering of indic text. The scope included only the basic phones with 12 key keypad and simple input methods without reliance on word dictionaries. The team came up with an intutive input method in the usual alphabetic order of script and switching in of additional layers to speed up data entry to access frequently occurring letters. He also gave away hardcopies of the recommendation to the attendees. He said that he plans to share the recommendation in a larger forum and encourage the vendors to adopt the standard.

After extensive brainstorming on indic input methods status, it is agreed that touch phones will become the key for extensive use of Indic languages. As touch phones become affordable at price points of less than 5000 Rupees, developing a input standard for them can help in speeding up deployment. The touch phone also does not have limitation on number of keys, so even simple methods can be easy to use. The firmware changes for phones already with public can also be done easily. Sunil from CIS offered to help promote from policy angle by working with Government apart from hosting future events at CIS.

IEEE-SA as an established leader in standards development, can help the industry through a time tested standard development process, which can protect IP of participants and also help in faster development of standard. The team felt that we are at right point in time to work on the standard and help enable mobile services for Indians in their own languages.

Indian language interface on basic cell phones from Samsung

2010-12-21T23:48:00.000-08:00

Continuing from my previous blog post on using Nokia cell phones in Indian languages I will share how Samsung phones work with Indian languages. I understand Samsung uses CDAC technology for its phones. A photo of Samsung Phone SGH-B100 introduced in 2006 is shown here. I use Hindi alphabet to explain the interface, but advise the other indic language readers to transliterate this post into their language using sites like http://girgit.chitthajagat.in/ to see the approximate mapping of alphabets in their language.

First let us take a detailed look at key mapping for Samsung SGH-B100 focussing on most common language alphabet. I tried looking for a manual on the net, but could find only English and Arabic ones. It is bad that Samsung or CDAC did not even provide a manual in Hindi.

**Samsung basic cellphones and their indian language keymapping**
Key	Language Keypad mapping
1	क ख ग घ ङ 1
2	च छ ज झ ञ 2
3	ट ठ ड ढ ण 3
4	त थ द ध न4
5	प फ ब भ म 5
6	य र ल व श 6
7	ष स ह क्ष त्र 7
8	अ आ इ ई उ with shift * key ऊ ऎ ए ऐ ऒ ओ औ 8
9	ा ि ी ु ू 9
*	Shift key:Halanth form for consonants or additional choices for vowel matras like ॆेैॊोौृ
0	ँ ंः ऋ ॐ 0
#	Space

Typing in the Indian language
Just like English, multiple key strokes are needed to input a letter from the alphabet. As the indian language alphabet is larger than English, 5 letters are mapped to a numeral key. Shift key(*) is used for halanth or vowel matra variants. Though entering indian language text may be tedious, people will realise the benefits in day to day usage. Now let me explain inputing text with the example of writing my first name Arjun (अर्जुन). First change the phone language to your language from the Phone settings menu. Then from the menu select contacts and then add contact using soft buttons. Then you will see the input mode with your language on the bottom row of the display. In case you are not getting your language text, please experiment changing the input mode by using the soft key on the right.

The first letter is vowel and अ, select key 8.shows the soft menu with 1-5 mapped as अ -उ, select 1
The second letter is a conjuct of र , ज and उ so press 6, * (shows halanth forms) , 2 (to select halanth form which is required for connecting the consonants),2 then 3 and 9 then 4
The third letter is consonant न, so press 4 then 5 . Then you will see अर्जुन.

Share your experiences of using the cell phone in native language. Please note that Hindi is not my mother tongue, so in case of any inadvertent mistakes in this post, please correct through a comment or let me know so that I can fix it.

Samsung's approach seems to reduce the keystrokes for entering text. In the above example, we needed 11 keystrokes versus the need of 16 keystrokes for Nokia.

The use of Indian languages is not popular due to lack of standards in input methods and other telecom technology issues. While an initiative is in progress to standardize use of 7 bit encoding for indian languages as part of 3GPP by CEWiT (presentation on indian language workshop dowloadable from CEWIT website), real benefits will be seen when the best keyboard layout is standardized and adopted by the Vendors. Vendors should get together to discuss the best keyboard layout and agree to offer it for free or on a very nominal fee and non discriminative basis for the benefits of technology to reach the society. Help from professional institutes like IEEE-SA can be taken, to leverage the experience of developing standards acceptable by all stakeholders.

Indian language interfaces on basic cellphones from Nokia

2010-12-10T00:29:00.000-08:00

Recently, I was returning from a trip to my native place by Train. My train was late by 45 minutes and I sat down on a platform bench. A middle aged woman was on the bench beside me. She said to me her relative's name and asked my help to place the call, while passing her mobile to me. I took the phone and searched for the contact, confirmed the name with her and then pressed the dial button and gave back the phone to her. I also noticed that the woman is a literate person, as she had in her hand a house warming invitation written in the form of Telugu Poems. As the indic language interfaces have appeared in the phones from Nokia, Samsung from 2005, I reflected for a while on the issues faced by people like her. I also thought about my other relatives, who have phones, but do not feel comfortable to use the phone for making calls or storing contacts. Though they have digital cell phones, they will key in the number as if they were using the Plain old telephone service of past. Many elders wait for their son/daughter to call them and never take the initiative to call on their own. I have seen people with good knowledge of English also fail to use the phone's features like SMS.

When I bought my first personal cell phone in 2005, I saw the Hindi letters printed alongside the English and Numerals on the keypad. I experimented briefly with Hindi interface for some time and switched back to English, as my mother tongue is Telugu and the same was not available on the phone. In my recent trip, I saw a Nokia phone 1650 with Telugu as language option. It is unfortunate that the keypad has Hindi lettering and not Telugu lettering even though the phone was sold in Andhra Pradesh, where Telugu is local language.

While trying to make a presentation for a conference on use of local languages for information sharing, I tried to search the net for information related to indic languages and cell phones on phone company sites, CDAC, TDIL and telecom service provider sites . What I got after extensive search was only a Hindi user manual of Nokia 1108. I could not get a single snapshot of Nokia/Samsung phones with their Hindi language keypad even in their press releases. Some bloggers uploaded images of some sample phones with Hindi keypad, when they were blogging about some of the phones general features. As those images are copyrighted, I set out to make my own photographs of such phones. I also wanted to write an article of the Indian language interfaces so that other people can get benefit from my experience. So here is a brief note on Nokia and its approach to Indian language interfaces. I use Hindi alphabet to explain the interface, but advise the other indic language readers to transliterate this post into their language using sites like http://girgit.chitthajagat.in/ to see the approximate mapping of alphabets in their language.

First let us take a detailed look at key mapping for Nokia 1108 focussing on most common language alphabet. Please see the Hindi user manual cited above for additional letter mappings.

**Nokia basic cellphones and their indian language keymapping**
Key	Language Keypad mapping
1	ँ ंः ् 1
2	अ आ इ ई उ ऊ ऋ 2
3	ऎ ए ऐ ऒ ओ औ 3
4	क ख ग घ ङ 4
5	च छ ज झ ञ 5
6	ट ठ ड ढ ण 6
7	त थ द ध न 7
8	प फ ब भ म 8
9	य र ल व श ष स ह 9
*	Halanth form
0	Space
#	Switch input language mode and assist method

Typing in the Indian language
Just like English, multiple key strokes are needed to input a letter from the alphabet. As the indian language alphabet is larger than English, 5 to 6 letters are mapped to a numeral key. Though entering indian language text may be tedious, people will realise the benefits in day to day usage. Now let me explain inputing text with the example of writing my first name Arjun (अर्जुन). First change the phone language to your language. Then from the menu select contacts and then add contact using soft buttons. Then you will see the input mode with your language on the top row of the display. In case you are not getting your language text, please experiment changing the input mode by pressing '#' key.

The first letter is vowel and अ, select key 2 once.
The second letter is a conjuct of र , ज and उ so press 9 twice, * one time (to form halanth which is required for connecting the consonants),5 three times and then 2 four times
The third letter is consonant न, so press 7 five times. Then you will see अर्जुन.

Share your experiences of using the cell phone in native language. Please note that Hindi is not my mother tongue, so in case of any inadvertent mistakes in this post, please correct through a comment or let me know so that I can fix it.

I will write another post on the Samsung approach of indic language interface. Till then enjoy indic computing if you or your friend owns a Nokia phone supporting an indic language.

Gyanpad(Knowledge Kiosk)

2010-09-16T08:58:00.000-07:00

Support for Indian languages on computers gained momentum around 2005 with support of Unicode. Five years have passed and I continue to hear the same issues about fonts, input methods for typing in native languages. Usage of computers through native languages has not gone beyond a small minority of people who are passionate about their native tongue.

In India, computer sales are growing year on year with negligible impact of the global recession and mobile phone density has grown rapidy beyond expectations. Net connectivity through dial up /ADSL modems/Wireless is available throughout the country. Broadband net connectivity is not growing rapidly primarily due to high cost, though people complain of lower speeds. Low speed connectivity can still be very helpful, if put to use for accessing knowledge sites like Wikipedia. To clear the input method hurdles, I present an application called Gyanpad (Sanskrit word for Knowledge and English synonym of Slate), which in its first avatar allows you to select an Indian language and search Wikipedia and sister sites in a user friendly way with just on screen keyboards. So you can call all your family /friends and introduce them to native language use on computers without them being scared by the big 101 key physical board with just English letters o n it .

Gyanpad(Knowledge Kiosk)-Hindi InscriptSearch

Gyanpad supports 15 Indian languages. Here is a mini user guide for Hindi. You can try this out even if you do not know Hindi, and explain easily to your family and friends. Click   Gyanpad application (here) . From now on, just use your mouse. Select Hindi-Inscript and click on 'Next' . Search page loads with Hindi Inscript "On Screen Keyboard".   You can see Hindi letter shapes on the screen. You can adjust the keyboard size if you are using Firefox with 'CTRL' and '+' or '-' key s. (Physical keyboard needed just for this step, if you have not configured it earlier). Suppose you want to type the word Hindi (हिंदी) , move to the keyboard button showing (ह) and click on it . Continue the same with the buttons showing (ि), (ं) (द) (ी) and then click on the 'Search' button. In a second, you will see the search results from wikimedia sites courtesy Google. Browse through the same and click on the page you want to see. The new page will open and you can navigate using hyperlinks. If you want to search for something else, use back buttons of the browser to reach the search page. So you will come to a situation, where you can't see the Hindi letter on the keyboard. Don't panic , just click on the button with 'Up Arrow ' (shift) and you can see different set of characters on the buttons. When you have to form complex letter with two or more consonants and then a vowel, make use of the combining symbol on the first panel called Halanth/Virama (्) after you type each consonant. Always end with the appropriate vowel symbol on the first pane.

May be you want to teach the young ones, who are more comfortable with English than Hindi. No problem select Hindi-Phonetic from the first page and you will see   Hindi Phonetic Keyboard. The initial pane has English lowercase letters. By clicking on letters correspond to English spelling of Hindi words, you can enter the word you want to search. For our example Hindi (हिंदी), just   locate ('h' )('i' ) ('n') ('d') ('I') and then click . You can   use upper case letters by 'Up Arrow'( Shift key) to get different sounds    d (द) D(ड) and long vowels. With 'CTRL+ALT' button, you can change the keyboard pane to show   Hindi letters, which you can enter, in case you are not able to get the appropriate Hindi letters using English keys.

I have built this tiny application using the Google resources . Google provides the 'On screen keyboard' (Virtual Keyboard) option from its home page, when you opt to use the customized site for your language. However, this application will be useful in Cybercafes/ Exhibitions/Training Centers/Computer Laboratories, where it is desirable not to customize the settings to avoid incovenience to other users.

Google is yet to release Inscript keyboards for other Indian Languages. So manage with Phonetic Keyboards.   Try it out and   share your feedback by commenting on this post.    It is my strong desire to see that information from   Wikipedia /Government /Not for Profit institutional sites is available free to every Indian using low cost netbooks/custom computing devices with just touch screen/mouse interface.   These devices can be made available at every public place, be it   corner retail store/bus stop/mall /hospital/...

Did not understand some of the words above, just go straight to Gyanpad application

and search in English/ native language.

When will we have Inscript Mobile?

2010-05-27T05:52:00.000-07:00

CDAC has released Inscript 5.1 proposal (requires user details form submission at the site) arrived after discussions with Microsoft IBM and Redhat. The new proposal enhances the Inscript to latest Unicode standard 5.1, by providing backward compatibility with mappings for for ZWJ, ZWNJ and an extended layer to encode the new character codes. The toggle key for basic to extended layers is not defined. Another proposal is to make the mapping language specific rather than script. For the Telugu language, my feedback is that Indo-Arabic numerals need to be retained as default rather than Telugu numerals.

However smart mobiles will become commonplace than PCs in 21st century, this standard is inadequate as most mobiles have keypads with about 35 keys for typing. As the computers are powerful, what is needed is a clever way to accommodate the most practically used letters of the language on this keyboard. As most users are bilingual, phonetic approaches make it convenient for new users to easily switch between the languages. Phonetic based schemes with dictionary support for word hinting from Microsoft and Google are now available for PC. Alternative statistical based input method approaches are becoming available with mobile phones targeting basic 12 keys models. Tirumalakrishna Desikachary has defined one Phonetic keyboard (released along with a font called Pothana) for Telugu language 10 years back. In this short and long forms of vowel are assigned to the same key. Vowel keys are treated as independent vowels if they appear first in the word and as dependent vowels (or matras of the preceding consonant) if they appear after the first letter of the word. This avoids wasting of keys for representing matra forms of vowels. This still uses 2 keys beyond the basic alphabet to accommodate 4 Telugu letters. Out of that only one (letter au) is in popular use and that when it is interchanged with chandrabindu, all the letters that are in popular use are accommodated on the English alphabet keys. Similar arrangement can be worked out for Hindi and other languages based on the initial proposals of Desikachary.
Compared to other phonetic methods like Itrans and RTS, Pothana keeps the mapping simple one to one except for the overloading of vowel keys based on the context. It is desirable to have standard for Phonetic input on mobiles to enable the IT revolution to benefit the masses.

Firefox Indic language usage is not growing rapidly

2010-03-20T08:56:00.000-07:00

Firefox is providing insight into download and use of its language versions from Dec-2009. It uses a feature called blocklist, where in the Firefox browser contacts Mozilla servers for updates on the malware websitesm once a day. Through this transaction, Mozilla is able to track the usage of the locale of the browser.

I got access to few Indic language report s (Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, ,Tamil, Telugu) for the past 3 months and tried to analyze the same. In the chart below, the downloads for the week are shown in the chart. Hindi tops the list, among the languages I have analyzed, an expected statistic in view of the larger population.

However the actual usage for the week ending 2010-03-14 is shown below. There is not much change in the last few months in these numbers. Hindi again tops the list, but its proportion of users from outside India is very much low compared to all other languages . Malayalam has large percentage of users outside India relative to to other languages. Hindi users are about 0.1% of the total users from India for Firefox 3.6 Version. Other language percentages are much below. Though the download numbers every week are roughly the same, the usage has not improved much in the last three months. This means that users are curious to find out the language version looks like, but many are not really using it.

It would be interesting to speculate about the reasons. Many users could be using computers provided by their employer. They may not be comfortable with the localized version. Or they might have experienced font display issues, if their system is not configured for rendering the language. Any other guesses and suggestions on how we can convert the downloaders into actual users?
More detailed analysis for Telugu is available in Telugu blogpost entry.

Indian Wikipedias-Grading based on Traffic Analysis

2009-11-14T05:07:00.000-08:00

Indian language wikipedia community has so far been looking at more of input statistics, like # of pages, page depth to measure their growth. Using absolute numbers based on content contribution is not a right metric to compare the languages. Outcome based measures like the # of unique visitors per Million speakers is a better measure. Instead of looking at ranking based on value, comparison between groups of languages based on grades can show better insights. I present here the same for Indian languages with more than 1 Million primary and secondary speakers. I have excludeded Sanskrit, Bishnupriya Manipuri (score of >10000) . I have dropped English (>10000) as it is a worldwide language and is not useful for comparison. I have included Chinese(zh) as that language has similar problems as our with regard to use on computers.

It shows Malayalam tops the list and is on par with Chinese (approximately 150). Tamil. Telugu, Marathi are in the second group(>50), Kannada, Urdu,Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali(>25) are in third group. Assuming that these language communities have similar issues with regard to Wikipedia, this trend is expected to continue for the next decade. Only surprise element may be, if Hindi beats the prediction and emerges as the top, because of it being treated as a national language and incorporating it in the curriculum. These statistics I hope will make the Indian Wikipedian communities think about what needs to be done to move to the top grade. Another interesting analysis on how soon these will grow would be, to look at the number of active Wikipedians and what is being done to prmote wikipedia in these communities. I will plan that for a later post. Meawhile I look forward to your feedback.
For those, who are interested in the inputs for this analysis, I have taken the daily statistics on 2009-09-01 and the language population numbers at wiki for generating this chart.

Promoting Indian Language Wikipedias

2009-11-07T18:40:00.000-08:00

Wikipedia in Indian languages are of great help to bridge the information gap. Concerted effort to promote Wikipedia awareness is needed. I have created a presentation showing snapshots of Indian language Wikipedia pages, which can be used at any relevant event to promote Wikipedia.

This was done on Ubuntu 8.10 with Open office 2.4, Firefox, Inkscape. There are certain difficulties in attempting this, as I am not a polyglot and know only four languages. This will also be useful for wikipedians tocompare the visual appearance of wikipedia in different languages and plan improvements in their own language version. Improvement ideas and help with additional text/content for the languages is welcome.

INDIKEYS: Keymap stickers for Indian Languages

2009-09-28T03:09:00.000-07:00

Using computer through my mother tongue is my hobby. I started doing it some time in 2005, when Linux started sporting this feature. The indic localization improved a lot. I also contributed to Telugu localization of Firefox. Recently, I became interested in Indian language Wikipedias. I realized that though there are lot of members, active contributors are very few.
The big problems I think are awareness and the hurdle to start typing in native language on the English keyboard.

While people from Asia pacific countries such as Japan and China can be proud of their native language support on Computers, we in India have to bear with this problem for few more decades. The colonial rule that we endured is a blessing because we acquired English language which benefitted us in IT. It is also a bane because it made our native languages second class citizens on computers.

While indian government has been working at this for quite some time, the use of native languges is dismally low. Even CDAC's release of Linux based distribution in Indian languages is hindered as it does not provide basic keyboard stickers for Indian languages using Inscript, a complicated key mapping scheme for newbies. There are costly foreign solutions. After trying for few months to find Indian language stickers, I came up with a simple sticker generation scheme, using printing on self-adhesive laser printer paper. A sample file for Telugu and the pdf are available. It can be easily adopted for other Indian languages.

Business Analytics for Railways reservation system

2009-08-15T03:30:00.000-07:00

Business analytics is one word which I started hearing from 2005 or so. This is much more jazzier form of the plain Management Information System of the early years of the computer. In simple terms, it means getting an insight from the customers dealings in the past and coming up with better alternatives and ideas to meet the customer needs. While this is being pursued by the private commercial organizations, there is a lot that government or public organizations need to do to provide a better experience for the customer. i will illustrate the same with a real life example of reserving a berth on Indian Railways.

Recently I was to travel to from Bangalore to Hyderabad and utilized the online reservation system of Railways to book a seat. While I have got the confirmed reservation for my onward journey, the status for my return journey was WL 119/WL92. So I had to make a decision on whether I should continue with my reservation for return journey or find alternate modes of travel. I had no means of knowing the chance of confirming a seat or a berth with the status that I was presented. As Railways has multitude of quotas including Tatkal and categories of reservation, I doubt whether it would be possible for even Railway officers to give any probability of confirmation. The only useful information is the final reservation charts for the train on the same day of week/month in the recent past. But these are not made available on the internet. If an analytics application is developed utilizing the past history of final train reservation charts for the same day of the previous week/month/year and the availability of total seats, it will help provide guidance to the travellers when they have to book a ticket.

Referring back to my case, I just went ahead with reservation with a prayer on my lips.I tracked the status regularly, and few days before the status got changed to RAC and then finally I was alloted a berth in the train after the TTE found few vacant berths after the train had commenced its journey.

Text: CC by SA 3.0
Image: From Wiki Commons :Indian_metre_gauge_Train.jpg

Computer Literacy for School Children

2009-02-22T02:53:00.000-08:00

Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan seeks to achieve universalization of elementary education by 2010. SSA also seeks to provide Computer Education to bridge Digital Divide.

I am contributing to a session on Computer Literacy for School Children during Barcamp Bangalore 8 on Mar 7-8 2009. In this we will explore the status of computer education in Schools and discuss how to usher in 100% Computer Literacy for School Children. We investigate the status of the school education, the approaches to bring down the cost of hardware and discuss the key issues towards 100% computer literacy for school children. The presentation is given below

Firefox indic session - A report

2008-09-14T03:44:00.000-07:00

As Mozilla is sponsoring this barcamp, Firefox stickers were issued to all the participants when they registered for the day. I presented Firefox indic session at Barcampbangalore7 on 14 Sep 2008. There were just 3 people in the audience when the session started. It soon became 10 to 15 people. The presentation went on for exactly 45 minutes, in an interactive mode.

Couple of students from Amritha Institute of technology were keen to understand the status of Tamil localization of Firefox. After the session, I showed them the relevant Bugzilla bugs and suggested the next steps like contacting the lead localizer and using IRC for all their questions. Several people wanted to know about easy ways of contributing to localization. I pointed them to Narro
project. One guy wanted to know why we are doing this, as there are not many people using localized versions. I explained that this is a chicken and egg problem and we need the localization to break the barrier, which will result in a positive feedback loop, making the technology reach most school educated Indians, even if they do not know English.

Firefox indic localization session at Barcamp7

2008-08-29T21:26:00.000-07:00

Barcampbangalore7, is scheduled for 13,14 September 2008. This is going to be my third barcamp. As is the norm in technology, by the third attempt, any product becomes successful or looses the race. So is any initiative. I thought I should start real contributions to the Barcamp.

I have been working on Firefox Telugu localization for over 9 months and went through a lot of learnings about contributing to the open source world, be it setting up wiki pages for project, creating email-lists or tracking fellow contributors and chasing the coordinators to increase the prirority for our initiative. The Telugu version of Firefox was to have released with Firefox 2.13, but is now likely to be available with firefox 3.0.2 beta . As several other Indian languages are also planned for release, I proposed a session in the upcoming barcamp on this topic.

I propose to cover the following

Brief history of Firefox, Features of firefox,
Localization tips
Other initiatives to strengthen Indic localization.

I welcome other contributors to join me for this session.