If you are to spy on the thousands of messages darting across Indian mobile networks at any given point of time, you may find some interesting linguistic patterns.
Indic Language computing enthusiasts believe — and are willing to bet on it — that the predominant SMS lingo of the average Indian is the local language. Then why must one be forced to SMS in English?
Tachyon Technologies, a Bangalore company, has released a midlet (a mobile application) ‘Quillpad’ that allows you to ‘transliterate’ or key in your thoughts (phonetically) in English and watch it being delivered in Hindi (Devanagari script). While online transliteration services have been around for some time now — with several home-grown companies and large email, chat and blogging services offering it for free — this is the first of its kind application on the mobile platform.
Quillpad’s web avatar, which (in 2006) preceded Google’s now popular transliteration tools by a year, registered no less than 1.16 lakh unique users in September. What makes it click? For starters, Quillpad’s predictive engine is far more intuitive (in interpreting the phonetics), offers more options and is more powerful than most home-grown technologies that clutter the Indi-webspace.
In its beta mobile release, Quillpad is a light-weight 355 KB application file that can be downloaded from the web site (or transferred through Bluetooth). Once installed, it offers a text-input mechanism — you can toggle between English, Hindi and numbers — and a full-fledged messaging menu. On typing the word phonetically in English, it offers multiple spelling options much like (and as powerful as) its online widget. It then encodes this into Unicode, connects to the phone and sends the message.
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