V Dhanalakshmi was a professor of linguistics in the Tamil department of an arts and science college in Tamil Nadu. Now she works with developers to design computing tools that enable the user to learn Tamil grammar.

Dhanalakshmi says language experts are sought after as the demand for products and services in regional languages is increasing.

Internet access

Vivekanda Pani, co-founder, Reverie Language Technologies, a company that provides regional-language capabilities in devices, says the demand for language-specific services has increased, with a surge in the number of people accessing internet from tier 2 and tier 3 towns.

According to a recent study, about one-third of the 351-million internet users in the country are from rural areas. Shankaran Nair, Executive Advisor, Uniphore Software Systems, a speech analytics company, says with the digitisation drive that includes digitising bank accounts across India, knowledge of local language becomes critical.

It is to tap this potential that many industries, especially those in the services, e-commerce and e-governance space, are engaging companies that specialise in building regional-language capabilities.

But for them to accomplish this task, these companies have to depend on linguists or speech scientists who study the language scientifically – its structures, grammar, syntax and phonetics – to help developers in designing a platform capable of responding to regional languages.

Role of linguists

Speech scientists, or linguists, have two important roles to play. First is their ability to recognise different languages and work with developers to translate it into an actual product using natural language process and machine learning. Next is improving the efficiency of the service by continuously updating the system to maintain the accuracy.

Reverie provides localisation of content for services and products and can support 35 languages – 20 Indian and other languages such as Burmese. Uniphore, which uses speech to improve consumer service, can support 14 Indian languages and 56 global languages such as Thai, Spanish, Arabic and French.

But the main challenge the companies face is finding the right talent. “Speech scientists are what we call a ‘hot talent’,” says Nair. He says that it is not easy to find the talent as what they are dealing with is high science and is complex as it involves computation as well.

“Also, these talents are quite expensive,” says Nair. According to him, the average cost of speech scientists could go as high as ₹55 lakh.

Pani agrees that finding the right talent is difficult even though having prior knowledge of computing is not necessary. “What we need them to do is create practical solutions for us. This is something not every linguist can accomplish and that is what we find challenging,” he added.

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