:: Akhar ::

Typing Utilities

Typing in Punjabi will be more fun and much easier, for those who do not know how to type in Gurmukhi using the Predictive Roman-Gurmukhi transliteration technique provided in Akhar 2010. Think of the text in Punjabi like you would pronounce it but type the same text in English and the software will do the corresponding transliteration in Punjabi. The software generates script symbols that match the sound of the phonetically spelt word. Akhar 2010 allows one to type in intuitively and in turn, intelligently performs the corresponding transliteration. Most of the Punjabis can read and speak Punjabi fluently but when it comes to typing Punjabi on the computer, they just can't do it even when though they may be very fluent in typing English. Akhar 2010 comes to the rescue of millions of such Punjabis who feel more comfortable typing in English but still want to communicate in their mother tongue, Punjabi.

One can also mix English words which are now part of Punjabi language, such as school, college, city, thanks, lovely etc along with the Punjabi words. The English words can be typed according to their English spellings and they will be transliterated to Gurmukhi. If a word with typical spellings is not transliterated properly it can be added to user dictionary.

The software uses artificial intelligence techniques to cleverly guess the most appropriate word/alphabet and presents the other phonetically similar words sorted on their relevance to the user in a suggestion box. The user can choose the appropriate suggestion if the software cannot guess the word correctly. The artificial intelligence based fuzzy logic techniques used by the software are backed up by a rich collection of lexical resources including a Punjabi corpus of more than 74 lakh Punjabi words, a Punjabi Dictionary of 1.5 lakh words and an English-Gurmukhi Transliteration dictionary of more than 20,000 commonly used English words and names.

Besides helping the common man to type Punjabi easily, the software can also be used to automatically convert the poems and texts typed in Roman Punjabi into Gurmukhi. The software can also be used to automatically transliterate names and addresses in databases such as telephone directory, examination records, land records etc. from Roman to Gurmukhi. This will save thousands of hours of labour. One can with click of a mouse convert the whole telephone directory from English to Punjabi in a few minutes.

A snap shot of Punjabi Typing Pad