Nasdaq-listed Rediff.com will offer its customers the facility to communicate in 22 different regional languages from January 2009, company officials said.
"After extensive study we found that regional languages are coming up on the internet in a big way. We will also be offering our customers the facility to communicate in 22 different regional languages soon," Rediff founder and CEO Ajit Balakrishnan said on the sidelines of 8th International Entrepreneurship Forum at MICA.
"For traffic signals one uses English language as per the US convention, but to communicate with friends people use multiple languages," Balakrishnan said, adding at least two new portals of Rediff offering facility to communicate in Gujarati language are in the pipeline.
Talking about the paradigm shift of internet users towards mobile, Balakrishnan said "Out of the two million customers in the US, 80 per cent have moved to mobile phone version of Rediff.
Speaking on emerging challenges in digital entrepreneurship, Balakrishnan said "In this era, algorithm based voice to text conversion technology is a big challenge to understand."
"The voice to text conversion technology will be there all over in another 3-7 years. An accuracy level of 90 per cent using algorithm based voice to text technology has been achieved for news readers, while 70 per cent for other kinds of dialects," Balakrishnan said.
The call centre business will face stiff competition from this technology, he added.
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