Language is a big barrier for smart phone users

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.