Imagine a 55-year-old farmer in rural Punjab or a 60-year-old domestic help in Tamil Nadu fumbling with the keyboard to create an email ID. Would it not be easier if he or she could create the ID in Punjabi or Tamil?

Today, even if a keyboard can be used in a local language, email IDs are usually in English because of the technology used.

However, things are changing. Now, nearly two lakh users have created accounts in their tongue through the Datamail app, developed by Ajay Data, founder and CEO, XgenPlus.

‘Ideal format’

Data, who recently became the first Indian council member of the Country Code Supporting Organisation (ccNSO), started the company in 1999 as an internet services provider, and moved on to provide email services in 2001 for large corporates.

According to Data, to break the language barrier using technology, just creating content is not enough. “You need to have domain name and email address in the local language to empower more people, majority of whom communicate only in a local language.”

In 2014, to expand his services, Data obtained two email domain names in Hindi. This is where the company hit the dead end. It could not configure them using its email software, or other similar services. “That is when I realised that this lacks a solution, and found an opportunity there,” said Data.

Challenges

Data set up a team of 30 members to create a platform that can accept local languages in mail headers using the Unicode character set. For instance, the current format, ASCI, can only support 50 characters. “But Indian languages need more. The Unicode UTF-8 format that can accept 1.17 lakh characters seemed ideal,” said Data.

There were challenges, of course. “The biggest challenge was our language itself,” said Data. Each language has a different script and meaning that made integration difficult. “For example, ‘inbox’ in English could have different corresponding words in Gujarati, Tamil and Telugu. How will we verify the right meaning across each language?” he asked.

They should also have checks in place to accept profanity words. This demanded a large repository of words in their software dictionary. Each language went through several iterations of verification and linguistic review before it was integrated.

Since 2016, when it was launched, the product supports 15 Indian and foreign languages such as Cyrillic (Russia), Arabic, Thai, Mandarin and Korean.

Way forward

In India, the company is in talks with State governments and enterprises. “The Rajasthan government has already started using it,” Data said.

There are also more languages in the pipeline. “We are working with the government to get the domain name for other languages.,” Data said. In the foreign languages space, it will launch the service with accented functionally in the Europe in October.

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