Ever since the introduction of cell phones in late
80s, they have undergone a drastic transformation and improvement. These phones
which were earlier considered only a medium of communication are no longer used
solely for that purpose. In their latest form, they have rather become a mini
computer. However, the up-gradation of technology for the mobile phone has not helped
every strata of the Indian society uniformly, and language is perhaps the most important
barrier for this scenario. The language barrier is preventing people from using
their phones to their
optimum capacity.
Most of the
phones in India have operating system software that is developed in English language,
and this makes it extremely difficult for non-English speakers to use
all the functionalities of the phone. It has been estimated that only about 10% of the total Indian population
or 125 million Indians can understand or speak English. Compared to this, the
number of smart phone users is much higher, maybe about 200 million and this
figure is increasing day by day. It is very important to
make phones customised for local Indian market so that the benefit of the
technology is transferred to everyone without any constraint of the language
that one is conversant in.
In the initial
stages of growth, companies were happy and satisfied targeting only the elite
about 100 million English speaking users, but now with the competition getting
more difficult, they need to look beyond that. Companies developing apps for their business also need
to design them keeping in view the unique needs of diversity of the Indian
population, which is not conversant in English and is spread across different geographical
markets. All these geographical segments speak different languages, and no
single language can be said to have acceptability as well as understanding
across all these different regions. If these regional languages are used for
apps and marketed as such in different market segments, this
can be a win-win situation for both users as well as developers. The rural
population can get the opportunity to use the technology in the comfort zone of
their own local language and the businesses will profit from the increase in their
customer base.
A few companies
are now getting into this domain and are providing various kinds of vernacular
language support on smart phones, but they mostly facilitate navigation between
different menus and often there is no support for typing messages. A few initiatives have been made to deal with this issue at the level of
operating system itself, which I guess is the right approach. Anant computing, for instance has come up with a
regional language operating system which has in-built support for vernacular
language on the keyboard through software updates on smart phones. This has
made it easier for mobile users to type mails and messages and also do google
search in local languages. Now even a rural woman living in a remote area can
confidently search anything on google by typing the text in the search engine
window in her vernacular language. (http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-tech/engineers-design-os-that-works-on-indian-languages/article5244209.ece#comments)
A blog post by Phani Bhushan, the founder of Anant computing platform states that the year 2015 marks 20 years of advent of Internet in India and yet not one Indian language is among the top 10 languages used on the Internet! Considering the size of the population, this is indeed surprising.
