This is a not-so-distant reality. Three students from the Punjab Engineering College (PEC), Chandigarh, have developed a chatbot (chat robot) 'Deepti' that actually speaks in Hindi. A chatbot is a software program that uses artificial intelligence to hold a conversation with a user.

Deepti is still in development stages, and is currently a Text-In-Speech-Out System (TISO): Just type your question in romanised Hindi format, and Deepti will answer in her digital Hindi voice. This is helpful for the illiterate and those uncomfortable with English. It even understands natural or colloquial language, which means you could speak to it as if it were your girlfriend. Talk to it for hours about anything - even cars or bikes -- and don't worry about personality clashes or mood swings. This is your very own virtual girlfriend!

Deepti is the brainchild of Rahul Jindal (presently with Infosys Technologies), who began working on it for his final semester project at PEC. It has now been taken over by Rohit Kumar and Ritvik Sahajpal of PEC, under the guidance of Prof Sanjeev Sofat. Other contributors to this project are Mayank Tyagi (Now in University of Texas doing his Masters) and Amberish Rathi (Now in IIM - Ahmedabad), along with Rishi Bihari who provided the Web hosting for Deepti.

The ever increasing percentage of people staring into computer screens waiting for the other party to reply, then getting frustrated at finding "dumb answers" was Rahul's inspiration to develop a Hindi-speaking chatbot.

Anywhere an interactive system is required, Deepti can be used: Railway stations, government offices, company Web sites, customer care centers, etc. It also has potential to help the blind.

At present, tourism, religion, sports, movies, PEC, politics and humour are topics that Deepti can chat on. And the more you chat, the more 'intelligent' it gets. It can grow as intelligent, witty or funny as its bot master.

Right now Deepti runs on Linux but the team is planning to port it to Windows soon. It will be available online as a free download for users to run on their PCs even when offline.

"Deepti is based on our concept of a Computing Time Companion. It's meant to make computing more interactive, interesting, simple and user-friendly," claims Rohit.

"User input is matched 'intelligently' in a database. The mechanism is responsible for converting complex sentences like 'Deepti, kya tum mere liye text editor khol sakti ho' to a simple command like 'Text editor kholo'," says Rahul.

Until now the user communicates with the bot through Unicode (or ASCII) characters. At this stage the bot output is being transformed to simulate human voice, using a Text-to-Speech system (TTS).

"Chatting is just one aspect. The TTS module is generic enough to be used in any application, the scope being limited only by human (Indian) imagination," says Rahul.

Future Plans:

With voice-recognition software and TTS translations, you could even interact with a bot over the phone or via SMS in future. "The biggest of our dreams regarding Deepti is to have a system capable of speech-input. LTRC (Language Technologies Research Centre, IIIT, Hyderabad) is also considering working on a Speech Recognition Software/ Module. Our team member, Rohit, did his vocational training there and has gained sufficient experience working on speech technologies," says Rahul.

"We also wish to move from command line interface to one that's Web-browser-compatible. For this we'd need to direct all input to a software port at which our server would be listening, so that appropriate responses can be played on a multimedia-enabled system through speakers. If all goes well, we also wish to have some form of lip syncing, so that the character on screen would seem to be speaking out its responses," says Rohit.

Other plans include adding dance beats, facial expressions and integrating their own speech engine (which is currently based on FestVox. They plan to launch it in three or four months as a free source code software for the world to improve upon.

More Resources: -- Free download of the chatbot -- More chatbots and their creators -- Social reaction to chatbots -- BotSpot: The Spot for all Bots

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