Indic Transliteration Google Talk Bots to Chat in Indian Languages

Google Talk has announced Indic Transliteration Bots recently. The transliteration bots converts text from English to Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil or Telugu.

You can invite the bot as a guest to your chat session. The bot transliterates what you type in English to the right local language.

Google India already provides this transliteration service that allows you to type in Indian languages using phonetically equivalent English script. This service is also available on Google Labs page, Orkut scraps and Blogger.

There are currently 5 transliteration bots.

English to Hindi – en2hi.translit@bot.talk.google.com

English to Kannada – en2kn.translit@bot.talk.google.com

English to Malayalam – en2ml.translit@bot.talk.google.com

English to Tamil – en2ta.translit@bot.talk.google.com

English to Telugu – en2te.translit@bot.talk.google.com

If you’re chatting in Malayalam, when you type ‘hello suhruthe, teck.in-lekku swagatham.’ the [email protected] bot will reply in Malayalam as ‘ഹലോ സുഹൃത്തേ, ടെക്ക്.ഇന്‍-ലേക്ക് സ്വാഗതം.’  (Dear friend, welcome to TECK.IN)

[advt]

Add the bot of your preference to your friend’s list. I added [email protected] for Malayalam. While chatting with a friend in the Gmail Chat Web Interface or the new Google Talk Lab Edition, invite the bot also into the group chat. Whenever you or your friend type something in English, the bot transliterate into the correspodning Indian language. Cool na!

Remember, this is transliteration, and NOT translation. I think we will have to wait for a few more years to have the translation coming up for Indian languages.