Making the world flatter

Since as part of our daily work we have to communicate with clients, in US or UK mostly, we come across a situation where our people face problem in understanding foreign accent and the same would be true for the client as well. I was thinking if we can build a product which can convert American accent to Indian accent in real time conversation. It's like the speech to text converter (ofcourse a lot more complicated than that)– initially all words need to be pre-recorded in pairs, American version and Indian version. Then once it receives a word it translates it into the other format. The toughest part is getting this thing done in real time conversation but once such a product is built it will be of immense use to IT industry at large.

No one would need to bother about hiring accent neutralization trainers or to train people in handling calls, just someone needs to talk in plain natural accent and the tool takes care of the rest. BPO industry would also benefit a lot.

Possible uses could be :

Language independence – imagine this feature is launched in India for all languages. A marathi can talk to a Punjabi or a Gujrati can talk to a Oriya without learning each other's language. They just need to talk in the language they are comfortable in and the application takes care of the rest.

Worldwide this will connect countries like never before – world will become flat in the truest sense. A vendor in Punjabibagh, who does not know how to talk in English can pick the phone and directly talk to a guy in US and sell his product. All he has to do is select Hindi-US as an option. Or for that matter he can do that with any country. The list is long :-) .

Seamless communication will happen in the truest sense and it will make common man focus more on business and less on communication related things.