• Github
• Documentation

What does ‘Dhwani’ mean?

The word Dhwani stands for ‘Sound’ in most of the languages spoken in the Indian sub-continent.

What does it do?

Dhwani is a simple phonetic converter engine for Indic languages. For example, you write a Kannada word in English script, and Dhwani takes care of converting that word from English script to Kannada script as shown here: kannaDa → ಕನ್ನಡ. Currently, Dhwani supports convertions listed here. I’m planning on including more Indic scripts into the tool. Till then you can checkout the documentation here!

Why this tool?

India is rich in diversity, if you travel just a couple of hundred kilometers in any direction, you will see the change in the language dialect, or the spoken language itself! It comes as no surprise that most of the primary and secondary education is taught in the native language of the region. This combined with a lack of language diversity in the IT sector keeps a significant population of young minds out of the IT field. Even though English has reached almost every nook and cranny of India, it is not as intuitive for these masses to start making significant contributions to the IT field.

The Baraha tool is an amazing piece of software for bridging the gap between mainstream IT and the use of Indic languages. However, it might not be the best at achieving the goal. Some of the major problems with the tool are:

• Not free software.
• Strictly runs only on the Windows Operating System.

Dhwani is entirely free and open-source software. It is aimed at making it simple for any person with a standard QWERTY keyboard to be able to type in their native language script with very minimal knowledge of the English language.

Currently, The Dhwani engine is written in Python and runs on any platform with Python-3.6+ support. I will be working on a client-side JavaScript version of this as well.

Next plans?

I’m currently making sure the Dhwani core gets stable. Going ahead, I have plans for adding support for internal caching which will help in real-time phonetic-translation such as in an editor, etc.