The Hindu Business Line : Mind that bloomer

Chat sessions on the Web are no longer informal. A spelling or grammar mistake could cost you a job opportunity. Aspire Systems says it can help one avoid those pitfalls.

IN the IT era, to think something is to say it.

That's why the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft started offering surfers the instant messaging (IM) service through their Web sites.

But with the corporate world cottoning on to the service - for various uses including internal communication, even recruitment - the service has acquired other dimensions.

Though still an informal communication medium, suddenly `chat' isn't something quite just between friends or loved ones.

What does that mean to me and you? More attention to grammar and spelling.

But chat sessions aren't like typing into an MS Word document armed with such checks, you might complain.

Help's at hand, with IMSpellCheck, developed recently by the Chennai-based Aspire Systems for a customer who wanted to capitalise on the lack of spell check on commonly used Instant Messenger applications such as MSN Messenger, AOL and Yahoo.

Shankar Krishnamoorthy, Vice-President, Software Development, Aspire Systems, says, "As the name indicates, this product checks the spelling mistakes and grammatical errors when we type in Instant Messengers and also intelligently corrects them.

For example, when we converse through the Instant Messenger, if we want to type in `Aspire' and type `Apsire' instead, it will indicate the error and also intelligently show the options for the right spelling.

It works as an add-in to Instant Messengers such as MSN Messenger. It is designed such that it can be embedded within any popularly used messenger."

"The user interface is similar to Microsoft Word. We identified language dictionaries, worked on a proof-of-concept to prove the feasibility of such a product and later developed this into a full-fledged one," says Krishnamoorthy.

Unlike e-mail messages, there isn't time to check or review spelling mistakes and avoid them in chats since they are instant.

Bloomers, while chatting with customers, colleagues and friends, might be embarrassing or worse cost one a job opportunity. This add-in would come in handy to avoid such mistakes, he says.

Feasibility challenge

The challenges of building the product were twofold.

"The first was coming up with an intuitive user interface that will make the user feel comfortable and not overloaded.

The second one was integrating the add-in with MSN Messenger. Many IMs do not expose their functionalities to build add-ins. Thus there was some uncertainty regarding the feasibility of developing such a product feature," says Krishnamoorthy.

"Our team created a proof-of-concept for this product where the initial version was to create an add-in, trying to mimic a few functionalities of popular Instant Messengers and creating a user interface for spell check.

This helped in building the confidence of the team and the solution was deemed practicable," he says. The IMSpellCheck costs about $20 for individual use.

It can be downloaded from http://www.spellaroo.com/ where a free 15-day trial is available.

A message of promise

Instant Messengers, Krishnamoorthy says, are changing the way organisations communicate with each other, within the company, with customers and with vendors. "It is a lot easier to beep my vendor to check up the status of projects rather than calling him. Targeted at anybody who uses Instant Messengers (IM) for communication, the market for such a product is large."

Recent studies at the Bigbluenetwork (http://www.bigblueball.com/) say that there are about 867 million IM accounts out there on the Web. More than 12 billion IM messages are floating around.

According to an IDC report, the market cap is expected to reach $1 billion by 2009. This accounts only for business users. Companies such as AOL, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and Jabber, among others, are betting their future on the IM market.

Aspire, Krishnamoorthy says, has successfully completed installing this feature in MSN messenger version 5.2. The product was launched on a customer's Web site and crossed 20,000+ downloads within the first few days.

"We are working on extending these features to MSN Messenger version 6.0 and also to the other popularly used messengers such as Yahoo, ICQ, AOL and others in the future," he says.

Picture by Bijoy Ghosh

paromita@thehindu.co.in