Quillpad: Typing in local languages made easy

Hailing from the small town of Shimoga in Karnataka, 34-year-old Ram Prakash Hanumanthappa, who holds a BTech degree in CS & Engineering from IIT Madras, always wondered why Indian languages were not popular on the Internet. Apart from that, the fact that he didn’t have much exposure to speaking in English led him on to do some research. He soon realised that it was simply due to the lack of an easy way of typing in Indian languages. He explains, “There were complicated rule-based Indian language transliteration methods, which I thought a common user would not have any incentive to learn. They expected users to strictly follow key combinations so that it was easy for computers to convert them to Indian languages. For one it put the onus on the user to follow strict rules, and on the other hand kept the role of the software trivial. This I thought should be other way round.”In fact, he strongly believes that users should be able to type intuitively and the software should take the onus of producing the correct output. The fact that he hadn’t touched a computer before he joined IIT Madras helped him relate to people who haven't been initiated to computers. This is what guides him when designing tools that will enable people to use software, but most importantly, without them having to learn a lot of new things. It also spurred his interest in machine intelligence and fuelled his aspiration to build intelligent systems that allow people to interact with them naturally. He saw problems in the existing transliteration technology and decided to develop a solution.Click here for full story