Local call

In today’s hyper-connected world, language is the fulcrum of all communication. From keying in words into the desktop keyboard, to typing on the latest keyboard app on smartphones, the input of language is the key ingredient to forward communication.

In global parlance, language holds a greater significance in terms of communication for its sheer scale. With over 6,000 languages being spoken by more than six billion people, proper communication becomes challenging.

While the Internet has played a great role in connecting the masses and creating a unified world order, unfortunately, the positives of the medium are yet to reach the global scale.

While the penetration of mobile-broadband is a healthy 74.8 per cent in the developed world, it lags behind at a meagre 19.8 per cent per in the developing world.

The absence of a healthy telecom ecosystem is robbing us of development, which can be achieved only if the acceptance of new mobility technologies is greater across untapped areas.

It is not that developing markets resist new technologies, but they face a language barrier that hinders them from embracing technological innovations completely.

Today, youth in Tier-II and Tier-III towns across developing markets want to be a part of the mobility revolution but do not have the opportunity to do so.

The reason is the lack of content in local languages. While their compatriots across developed markets enjoy mobile content in their primary language, users in developing markets lag behind the curve.

What is the solution? The most intrinsic solution in hand is to create a dedicated ecosphere that helps deploy greater content in local languages.

Today, a greater industry focus can help create a more unified user experience based on localised content, which will truly lead to the next telecom revolution.

While resources to port content to local languages are available in the industry, the need is to create a developer’s perspective towards design and development.

Google’s initiative in being involved with the Endangered Languages Project, an initiative to document and prevent the extinction of more than 3,000 languages worldwide, is commendable in this context.

While major players such as Google can look towards safeguarding languages and create documentations around it, more industry players should also come forward to help develop content in local languages which will, on the one hand, help prevent the loss of the language and, on the other, will help native language speakers to reach out to the mainstream via available technology.

The resources to optimise content in regional languages are definitely out there.

For example, Siri, Apple’s natural language user interface, is today available in eight languages (English, French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Italian and Spanish) with new languages up for addition in the coming future.

While Siri and its compatriots like Google Now, Samsung-S Voice and Microsoft’s Bing Command grow linguistically, the time now is ripe to deregulate this segment and bring in more focus to developing language dictionaries and local content to bridge language gaps and bring people closer.

That will help take human race to a more enlightened future.

The writer is CEO of KeyPoint Technologies

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