Software development company Tachyon Technologies' phonetically-driven Quillpad released this month enables users to email in three Indian languages with more planned to be added.

"It's a new (software) language we've developed and it's a first," says Ram Prakash, Tachyon Technologies' chief executive, and one of the keyboard's inventors.

"To type a word which comes phonetically close to a local language all the user needs to know is the English alphabet," he told AFP.

The company sees a potential worldwide market for their invention which right now allows people to communicate in Hindi, the national language, and two southern regional ones, Tamil and Kannada.

"The market out there is huge. Imagine sitting in any country you can send a mail to your mother or your friend in your own mother tongue," says Prakash, a founder of Tachyon.

There has been no attempt to make an Indian language keyboard as yet because "Indian languages are very complicated" with their own script but this software is the next best thing, he says.

Tachyon Technologies has licensed the software to a top Indian portal, rediff.com for an undisclosed sum but any person can log on to the Quillpad website -- www.quillpad.com -- to send emails free of charge.

"The idea is to get in more traffic first and later earn revenues out of advertising," says Prakash.

He describes Quillpad, which he developed with company cofounder Sreeram Kandallu at Tachyon's headquarters in the southern city of Chennai, as nothing short of a "revolution" in local language communication.

"Other softwares such as Baraha are available where one has to learn a set of rigid rules including symbols and capital letters to get the correct word in any Indian language," he says.

But "in Quillpad you just need to think in your local language and type in English. The transliteration-based software which makes use of artificial intelligence takes care of the rest," he says.

The software codes were written to make the computer "learn" by pulling out "patterns" out of a huge database, he says.

"What we're saying is let the user type what he knows phonetically. From the phonetic character the software figures out the right word," Prakash says.

"Ninety-five percent accuracy is assured. It (software) predicts the sound for each key and one can type without any restrictions," he says.

"We'll be expanding to all the Indian languages soon," he adds. India has 24 languages.

Tachyon co-founder Kandallu says the next phase of the project is to launch an Indian search engine.

"The entire (search) language will be India-centric. India is a neglected market from the point of technology. Heavyweights sitting in Silicon Valley normally ignore this market," he says.

Meanwhile, first-time Quillpad user Kavita says she can email in her own language easily.

"Now I can convey exactly what I think," she says.

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