Text reading system in Mizo language

Duration: 18 Months (Start Date: June 2010, Completion Date: November 2011)

Objective and brief description:

Mizo is the most developed tribal language of the North-East India and is taught in many schools and colleges. Mizo alphabets were made by British Christian Missionaries who came to Mizoram in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. During that time, Mizos were not having any kind of text writing system. So, when British came, they felt that it was necessary to make alphabet system for the people of Mizoram and the alphabets were prepared based on the pronunciation of Mizo language. Before making alphabet system for Mizo people, extensive comparisons were carried out to make a choice between Indian scripts like Hindi, Bengali etc and Roman scripts, which is used by English. Then the missionaries opined that Roman Script was most convenient for the people of Mizoram.

Over the past few years there is a growing need in the Mizo community for a system which can read out Mizo text document for Mizo Blind people. Such text reading system will consist of an Optical Character Recognition in Mizo language and a Mizo TTS (Text –To-Speech) system.

Major objectives of the project are:

Development of Mizo Text reading System for visually challenged people of Mizoram. A scanned Mizo-document will be fed to the Mizo-OCR system integrated with the Mizo Text-to-Speech Synthesis system for generating corresponding Voice output in Mizo language