Use Quillpad, type in your local language on FB, Twitter

BANGALORE, INDIA: Getting a written word in your mother tongue sound phonetically right, while typing in English could be an arduous task, if the transliteration tool you are employing proves inadequate. Many of us would have faced this situation more than once, whether it is for a tongue-in-cheek post on Facebook or a sincere comment on a vernacular news website.

Quillpad Roaming promises to put an end to your miseries, and how! Developed by Tachyon Technologies, it helps one integrate its transliteration/editing tool to any websites, which would enable you to key in anything in the language of your choice, which is currently limited to eight Indian tongues.

Its founder and chief executive officer, Ram Prakash H, says that besides popular e-mail, news and social media portals like Google, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Yahoo! Mail, Wordpress, Blogger and Wikipedia, users can go to any other websites, by entering the URL on Quillpad Roaming's site and completing the registration process. However, it's currently compatible with only Google Chrome.

On Quillpad Roaming, "One doesn't have to install any plug-in, browser extension or configure anything; you just have to enter the URL. It's free and has multiple authentication," explains Prakash. Here, you get two choices: you can register either with Quillpad itself or can do so using your Facebook or Google login credentials.

Before 2006, he says that transliteration tools necessitated users to type according to pre-defined rules, like getting the pronunciation right in any local language by using case-sensitive characters in English (for instance, like rAShTrabhAShA, in Hindi). Prakash adds that Quillpad is a transliteration tool running on simplistic Indic input technology that allows users to type words as they would normally do.

As of now, Quillpad Roaming supports nine Indian languages - Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu - among which Prakash says Hindi is naturally the most preferred, because of the sheer number of native Hindi-speaking users. "We have demonstrated our capabilities in Arabic and Korean as well, but that's not the focus right now," he adds.

In addition, Quillpad supports multiple ways of typing a same word in these languages. "The Quillpad Machine Learning module can learn a new language within a matter of few hours. The engine is not even specific to Indian languages. It can learn any language that can be transliterated using any other script equally well. We don't need to change even a single line of code in our Quillpad Learning Engine to achieve that," elucidates Prakash.

Another key differentiator between Quillpad and other similar transliterating tools, he says, is its capability to create pre-rendered picture messages on mobiles using the tool. "We might add video and animation later, depending on our user requirements," points out Prakash, who has a team of nine employees, comprising five engineers based out of Bangalore, managing the tool, which is also being employed by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) for its ambitious Aadhaar card project.