Comments on: Microsoft’s Indic Language Tools: Why Bother?

By: Farah

Farah — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 16:10:11 +0000

Praise the Lord for voices of sanity like Hari over here. Nahi tho aisa lagra tha ke ek dum se inthne saare beqoof kahaan se aagaye!

Yeh hai India ka kamaal. With 1.2 billion people the "ghadhah" index is truly high. But there is always atleast that one sane voice out there. Kya khayaal hai Nikhil bhai?

By: Hari

Hari — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 06:53:32 +0000

I dont see why anyone should even create transliteration products. Its a 'kluge' and does not address the gap in input devices (keyboard) etc in local languages. No native language speaker is going to sit around figuring out how to get to their language using an englsih input device.

These are all pure PR exercises. I would rather MS invest time and effort in figuring out a good input device (maybe voice transcription or keyboard) and enable distribution of the same. Much more useful to the end user.

Nerds/techies and PR managers are not the holy grail for this product!

By: ardibehest

ardibehest — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 05:24:41 +0000

Hi guys try this one. Beats Google and Quill-Pad hollow. Comes from the stable of the guys who put Indic computing on the map. Pity it is not in the market and also pity it works only for Hindi and Gujarati: http://transliteration.cdac.in/

By: karan randhawa

karan randhawa — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 18:13:04 +0000

Did you turn on Complex Script Support in XP? If you've used any IME before (Baraha, Bhasha, or even Google Transliteration on the web), this is a well known first step. I'm not saying it's ok for MS to expect the user to know this, but this isn't a fair to them to trash the product altogether.

I plyed around a bit and must say, I'm actually very impressed.

Another thing. This seems to be a limited tech preview (not a beta as you say) that has now closed. The page says a public version is coming soon. I'm a little confused as to why the link was published at alland then taken down so quickly. Come to think of it, only The Hindu seems to have published it, so maybe their screwup.

By: Raj

Raj — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 20:24:05 +0000

Mr Pahwa – you make me smile :) — You are India's Michael Arrington.

Before anything else – please proof read your posts before posting (bunch of typos etc).

1. Who the hell reads or even expects 'tutorials' ? Which era are you living in ?
2. A 'beta' essentially means that only. A Google Beta is a fraudy beta — just to cover their asses in case they lose someone's critical data.
3. Microsoft only realased it for IE but I use chrome. Do you know what's Chrome's market share ? Do you know Google Talk Client still doesn't have a MAC version ?

Can you please stop sucking up to Google all the time and provide some unbiased journalism ?

By: Farah Rahman

Farah Rahman — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 13:14:59 +0000

Oh man Nikhil,

Kya post hai bhai yeh tho! DOA indeed.