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Published on July 8, 2007

The Department of Information Technology of Bhutan and the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec) of Thailand have signed a memorandum of understanding to provide a transfer of technology between researchers and developers of the two countries.

Under the five years of cooperation, the researchers will transfer technology related to electronics, computers, telecommunications and information technology.

Lyonpo Leki Dorji, Minister of Information and Communications of Bhutan, said the country plans to develop Dzongkha, the national language, as natural language processing (NLP) in various areas including Optical Character Recognition (OCR), text-to-speech and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in the next five years.

NLP is a sub-field of artificial intelligence and linguistics. It studies the problems inherent in the processing and manipulation of natural language, and involves natural language understanding devoted to making computers "understand" statements written in human languages.

Text-to-speech technology allows an alternate spoken method of conveying text information. As the name implies, text-to-speech converts ASCII text into the spoken word. Instead of a digitised recording, however, a synthesised voice is used to speak out words and phrases.

OCR is technology that converts text scanned as a graphic into text a word-processing program can use. This involves analysis of the scanned-in image, and then translation of the character image into character codes, such as ASCII. OCR is being applied by libraries, businesses and government agencies to create text-searchable files for digital collections.

ASR is an experimental technology being developed where a user's normal speech pattern would be recognised by a technological device in real time with accuracy. All words that are intelligibly spoken by any person, independent of vocabulary size, background noise, speaker characteristics and accent, could be recognised.

"It is a good opportunity for both countries since the researchers and developers will able to exchange their resources, knowledge and technology, and that will create benefits for both," said Pairash Thajchayapong, chairman of Nectec.

He said that Thailand has had some success developing NLP, text-to-speech and ASR, which could benefit users such as disabled people.

To develop NLP for Dzongkra, Bhutan hopes Thai researchers and developers will transfer technology to Bhutan to create new technology and encourage people in that country to use their national language since most Bhutanese now use English.

Dorji said that Bhutan is a small country which now has 546,000 people. The country introduced Internet infrastructure only in 1999. There are now 10,000 Internet users, 3,000 fixed-line users and 9,000 mobile-phone users.

The country has three local Internet service providers and two mobile-phone operators. It also utilises new technologies such as broadband infrastructure, Wi-Fi and Wire Max to provide Internet access to people in the landlocked nation.

"We try to develop and apply new technology for our people. This agreement is very important for the two countries since it will provide knowledge and experience to both," said Dorji. In the first stage, Bhutan will start to develop text-to-speech technology and expects to complete this in the next three years.

Jirapan Boonnoon

The Nation