Reading Easy

A local company broke the language barrier, developing a Sinhalese text recognition solution that interprets printed documents as text.





A local company broke the language barrier, developing a Sinhalese text recognition solution that interprets printed documents as text. Developers, Sanje Lanka say the Sinhala Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system allows users to move away from saving images of documents to cataloging documents in text formats.

The solution has a ready market with the Government, where volume after paper volume of documents sit on valuable real-estate colleting layers of dust.

The firm also working on a retail version of the products and says licensing policies would also be defined.

Up to now, letters of the Sinhalese alphabet when scanned and entered into the computer, could only be read as an image, because the machine was not able to recognise them as characters.

Officials say he development will help do away with the data entry operator and minimize human errors.

At present the company is working with several government departments, including the Department of Census and Statistics