Language Sms

Vernacular SMS and MVASA tool for mass communication in near future Exploring Opportunities and Challenges in India

Mobile: Socio-economic impact in India Impact of Increase in Mobile Penetration on Growth in GD 1st order of impact of increase in mobile penetration on growth in GDP (impact of voice primarily by allowing people to connect / talk) VAS and off-deck usage will bring in 2nd order of impact on GDP growth

VAS: Taking delivery thru mobile further Universal Reach / Inclusive Growth Enterprise / SME / Rural / Poor urban areas Leapfrogging the PC Low cost access medium for entertainment, information Utility of Content and Services Commerce, Rural applications, Local Content Driving Innovation Localization, Voice based VAS

The future of MVASA INR 121,000 crore industry over the next 5 years VAS as % of total telecom revenue in India remains lower as compared to other markets today; However it is expected to contribute INR 35,400 crores in 2013

Off deck mobile VAS Key Growth drivers for Off deck Mobile VAS Evolving ecosystem, continued push by D2C players and emergence of alternate billing channels will be the key growth drivers for off-deck mobile VAS in India

The importance of SMS A2P SMS remains the most effective and timely way to reach out to people (for business, social organizations & govt.) & is therefore critical from a social and economic perspective

SMS: Evolution of an effective mass communication media Often overlooked, this A2P SMS is a very powerful mass market medium. With 400 mn expected subs and 5 A2P SMS/day this corresponds to 2 Billion pieces of information delivered per day

Reach of Indian Languages 10 Million Indians study Hindi every year. Similar numbers for others. Top 10 Indian newspapers are regional Top TV channels are vernacular. Star TV converted 100% to Hindi In urban India, only 37% of the literate population knows English; the number drops to 17% in rural areas 10 out of top 30 most-widely used languages worldwide are Indian 8 out of top 50 best-selling newspapers in the world are published in an Indian language Compared to only 3 English language papers from India in the list Despite these impressive statistics, not a single Indian language makes to the list to most-widely used languages in the mobile/Internet world

SMS Usage in India SMS continues to be most popular non-voice service but usage levels are still low compared to other countries

Explaining the Gap One of the contributing factors towards high SMS usage in Philippines and China is pricing In Philippines, SMS started as a free service! Voice calls are cheaper in India but SMS pricing levels are relatively higher Another important factor is the use of standards-based solutions for local language SMS In Philippines, local languages use Roman script, so 7-bit default GSM alphabet can be used The inherent efficiency of Chinese language mitigates the inefficiency of 2- byte UCS-2 encoding Both countries have lower English-literacy levels compared to India Local language SMS is used heavily

The Challenges Establish a standard in the eco-system Telecom Operators Device Manufacturers Application Providers

The Challenges To evolve a core system of Indic MVAS/SMS to be implemented uniformly across vendors and service providers Font rendering to make the fonts standard across all handsets Key pad design challenge How do legacy handsets which donot have this Indic feature be included in them Regulatory Aspects

Existing Coding schemes for messaging GSM Alphabet – Supports languages that use Latin character set UCS-2 – Supports all major languages of the world User-defined – Any arbitrary character set can be defined

Encoding Indian Languages in UCS-2 Users who want to send an SMS in an Indian language are faced with two disadvantages from the encoding point of view Complexity of Indic scripts results in relatively high number of characters per word on the average With UCS-2 encoding, only 70 characters are allowed per message The net result is that only a few words can go in a single SMS

Current Scenario SMS in several Indic languages is currently supported by operators Based on proprietary picture-messaging based solutions since UCS-2 is inefficient and/or not supported Picture-enabled handsets needed to display SMS

Indic SMS Challenges Indic SMS challenges Standards-based solution at the same cost as English SMS Inter-operability across operators and devices

Requirements Basic requirement Standards-based solution with the same level of encoding efficiency as the 7-bit GSM alphabet Additional requirements All 22 official languages must be supported Support for bi-lingual messaging (Indic + English) Optional requirement Enable easy transliteration between Indian languages

Support for National Languages Two methods have been specified for including National Language characters in a short message Single shift mechanism ‘Escape’ character is used to signal that the next character is encoded using a National Language Shift Table Locking shift mechanism All the characters are encoded using a National Language Locking Shift Table In both cases, the language being used is indicated by an identifier added in the message payload

Work till date Indian language tables developed Based on the 3GPP templates for 7-bit locking and single shift tables Using the character sets for Indic languages defined by Unicode Consortium Tables for 10 languages/scripts have been defined Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu As the same script is sometimes used by more than one language, the 10 tables can support all the 22 official languages of India

Indic Locking Shift Tables Locking Shift Table of an Indic language consists of Control characters pre-defined in the template (4) The lower case English alphabet (26) The numbers 0-9 (10) A small subset of special characters commonly used in SMS (8) The commonly used characters of that language (80, at most) Non-Indic characters appear in the same positions as in the GSM table This ensures that even if a handset does not have the locking table, at least the English part of a bi-lingual SMS can be decoded Similar sounding characters of different languages are put in the same positions (not always possible because of differences in character sets) Enables easy transliteration

Indic Single Shift Tables Single Shift Table of an Indic language consists of Control characters pre-defined in the template (4) The upper case English alphabet (26) Remaining special characters from default GSM alphabet (31) Characters of the Indic language which do not appear in its locking shift table (67, at most)

Key Benefits in New Encoding Scheme An SMS written in any of the 22 official Indian languages can have up to 154 characters Nearly as many as in an English SMS! English words can be included in the message without extra overhead Transliteration from one language to another is very simple Compatibility with Unicode character sets for Indian languages Possibility to augment the character sets using free spaces available in the single shift tables

English is “NOT” an Indic Script

Understanding Unicode for “Indian languages”

Language over script Unicode script code pages are almost exhaustive for a “script” Support for a language is significantly simpler 3GPP Indic Language Tables also adopt the simplicity “LANGUAGE” is different from a “SCRIPT”

The text entry Challenge: The English Bias

Closing the Loop IntroducingStatistical Techniques to Language SMS Faster than ENGLISH keypad Best predictive efficiency Least effort in key movements Least number of key taps ( > 3 taps per character is unacceptable) Most Intuitive Wins 97% of the times

The Challenges To evolve a core system of Indic MVAS/SMS to be implemented uniformly across vendors and service providers Making SMS services cost effective. Presently India is high on the SMS versus Call costings. Penetration will be a factor of pricing. Font rendering to make the fonts standard across all handsets Key pad design challenge How do legacy handsets which donot have this Indic feature be included in them Regulatory Aspects

Issue : Backward Compatibility with Legacy Devices A handset that supports the new 7bit Indic encoding sends an Indic language SMS to a legacy device

Solution C Conversion from 7bit Indic to UCS2 and visa versa A Silent Conversion application is required A Mechanism by which received messages are converted to UCS2 Multiple concatenated messaged can be handled.

Solution P: Conversion before delivery Recipient phone does not support UCS2 Received Message can be converted to picture message Solution1: Before delivering to the Recipient Solution2: SIM can send it for Conversion

Solution P: Conversion after delivery

Regulatory Aspects The standard only defines a method for representing Indian language characters in short messages using 7-bit codes Handset vendors may or may not choose to implement it A vendor may decide to support only a subset of the Indian languages for which 7-bit tables have been defined Furthermore, the 3GPP specification (TS 23.038) states that: Encoding of a message using the national locking shift mechanism is not intended to be implemented until a formal request is issued by the relevant national regulatory body Regulatory intervention is required to mandate the support for 7-bit Encoding and other necessary features required for Indic SMS

Thanks Credits Dr. NadeemAkhtar (CeWIT) Biju R Balagopal (ComViva Technologies) Sharad Sharma (NASSCOM) SwaranLata (TDIL) VikasPhogat (SagemOrga) VivekananadaPani (Reverie Technologies)

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