Bangalore based Tachyon Technologies has launched an Android application called Quillpad Hindi Facebook Chat, that lets users chat with their friends on Facebook Chat in Hindi, irrespective of whether the Hindi font is installed. The app is currently available as a free download on the Google Play Store. We tried the app on our Android device (Micromax A90S) and found it quite simple to use. Similar to Facebook messenger, the app consists of only two tabs - Friends online and All friends and one can select a friend and start off a conversation. The app currently features a transliteration text input mode, which allows one to type in English letters, which automatically gets converted to Hindi/Devanagari font while typing. This is quite similar to how Google Hindi input app works, except for the fact that Google Hindi input is a keyboard on its own while this app supports other third party keyboards as well i.e. one can use text input apps like Swiftkey or Swype and still make use of the transliteration input mode offered by the app. As we said earlier, this approach makes the process of writing in Hindi less cumbersome for those users who are affluent with English letters and find it difficult to use a Hindi language keyboard. Note that Tachyon Technologies does not have a word prediction dictionary. Instead it relies on decision trees which maps every English character in the input to a one or more Unicode characters in the output language. No Search? While the app does what it claims, the lack of search…
