Merit: HealthLine
Name of Product or Application: HealthLine
CEO: Jahanzeb Sherwani
Website: www.cs.cmu.edu/~jsherwan/
Email: jahanzeb+pasha@gmail.com
Research and Development is one of the key areas where excellence needs to be achieved and consistent initiatives need to be taken in order to achieve potential water shed moments in technology innovation. PASHA also recognizes quality RnD ventures in order to encourage further quality investments into looking for new frontiers in technology development.
In this category PASHA recognizes the Healthline system, which is trying to develop a platform for Speech recognition, speech synthesis, dialog management, for Pakistani languages. Currently, no commercial system for speech recognition in Urdu or Sindhi exists – Healthline has developed a method that allows the use of a speech recognition engine created for one language (e.g. US English) to be used for another language (e.g. Sindhi) and in recent experiments, the application has shown a very accurate recognition rate (greater than 90%). Results of this experiment are pending publication.
The company has also tested prototypes with low literate users in various parts of Sindh: in Memon Goth outside Karachi, in Wahi Pandi near Dadu, and in Umarkot, all in collaboration with a Karachi-based NGO (HANDS) that has been managing public health programs in the region for more than 10 years. Through these prototype tests, the company has created a system that works very well for illiterate users and allows them to access information even if they have never been to school. Tests comparing the speech system to an equivalent touch-tone system showed that the speech system was preferred by users, and also enabled them to complete a set of information access tasks more accurately than the touch-tone system.
For a country largely made of people where Education is a challenge, verbal communications becomes vital. With telephony access rapidly rising, speech recognition can certainly be the next frontier. With this award, PASHA hopes to encourage the spread of knowledge and enhance mutually beneficial initiatives for the large community.
