The Centre for Research on Bangla Language Processing at BRAC University launches the first Bangla language processing software package in Dhaka yesterday. Photo: CRBLP

The Centre for Research on Bangla Language Processing (CRBLP) at BRAC University yesterday launched the first official release of a Bangla language processing software package.

The software package includes text to speech (TTS) and optical character recognition (OCR) named “Katha” and BanglaOCR, respectively, according to a press statement.

CRBLP has been working on Bangla language processing since 2004.

The TTS system can help tackle illiteracy problems, empower the visually impaired and increase the possibilities of improved human-machine interaction, CRBLP said.

Bangla OCR takes scanned images of a printed document as input and converts it into editable text.

The TTS and OCR will run on Linux, Windows and Mac OSX. There is also a web-enabled front-end for the TTS, making the tools available anytime, anywhere.

Although such software exists for other languages, this is the first release for Bangla in Bangladesh. All the software are released under an open source licence.

Dr Salehuddin Ahmed, pro-vice-chancellor of BRAC University, was present as the chief guest.

The centre is supported by grants from the PAN Localisation Project (PanL10n) of the International Development Research Corporation (IDRC) of Canada and Microsoft Corporation of USA.