dhvani is the Text-to-Speech effort of the Simputer Trust. The aim of this effort is to ensure that literacy and knowledge of English are not essential for using the Simputer. Using images in conjunction with voice output in local languages makes the Simputer accessible to a larger fraction of the Indian population.

Currently dhvani has a phonetics-to-speech engine which is capable of generating intelligible speech from a suitable phonetic description in any Indian Language . In addition, it is capable of converting UTF-8 text in Hindi & Kannada to this phonetic description, and then speaking it out using the Phonetics-to-Speech engine.

Development efforts are on to create a better phonetic engine, a platform indepedent Java port, a language independent framework etc.

Check out the new Hindi TTS Prototype Demo (Java Applet Version)
Note: This applet is approx. 1.3 MB in size. Not recommended for slow line access.