The government on Thursday released text-to-speech (TTS) software in six scheduled Indian languages, to be given to users and developers for free.

"This is a landmark achievement of TDIL and team. It will help us provide access of information technology to over 1.25 crore people in country who are visually challenged to some degree," Minister of State for Communications and Information Technology Sachin Pilot said in the Capital.

With the help of the software, a person can listen the word he types on a computer. It helps user in understanding the layout of screen as it reads out the option selected by the user.

Earlier TTS technology was available in the Hindi and the English languages. The Indian languages in which the software has been launched include Marathi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam.

"After efforts of over four years, this is the first time TTS Indian regional languages have been developed," Swaran Lata, director and head, Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) said here.

"The commercial copy of TTS available in the market is priced at Rs 53,000 for three licences but the TTS developed by TDIL will be given free of cost to users," Hema Murthy, Professor, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras said.

IIT Madras lead the team of IIIT- Hyderabad, IIT- Kharagpur and CDAC in development of TTS. Pilot also unveiled Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Systems software which can read out text from a scanned document or a file in Hindi and Punjabi.

"TTS is available with IIT Madras. Interested user can request for it on e-mail and it will be shipped free of cost. OCR is service which user can avail by uploading document to be read out on TDIL website. The document will be read out after its processed by software. This service is also non-chargeable," Vijay Kumar, additional director, TDIL said.

Kumar said that proposal to send the processed version of document through OCR on e-mail is also under evaluation by the ministry.