The Kumbh effect: Rlys to make announcements in six languages, more to be added soon

The railways has started public announcements for Kumbh Mela in Allahabad in six languages to benefit the non-Hindi speaking passengers which is likely to continue beyond March 4 when the mela ends, a senior railway official said Wednesday.

The system, which runs on software specially designed for this purpose, auto-records an announcement, which is then translated by the specially developed software in six languages: English, Gujarati, Marathi, Kannad, Tamil, Malayalam.

"We realized very early in our preparations for the Kumbh Mela that we would be needing such a multilingual announcement system at the actual time when the Mela would be in progress" said North Central Railway (NCR) spokesperson Gaurav Krishna Bansal.

"Our Commercial department set to work on an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based system which was a success and has started working at Allahabad Junction" he said.

Besides the languages mentioned above, work is in progress on automatic translation of Hindi announcements ..