News
Previous News
November, 2019: Our paper, The Internet of the Orals and Designing ICT Interventions for Women in Pakistan, are accepted at Communications of the ACM.
July 30, 2019: Our paper, Towards Digitization of Collaborative Savings Among Low-Income Groups, is accepted at CSCW 2019.
December 10, 2018: Our papers, Voice-Based Quizzes for Measuring Knowledge Retention in Hard-to-Reach Populations and Threats, Abuses, Flirting, and Blackmail: Gender Inequity in Social Media Voice Forums, are accepted at CHI 2019.
June 21, 2018: Our paper, The Case for IVR-Based Citizen Journalism in Pakistan, is accepted at MobileHCI 2018.
June 04, 2018: Our paper, Rapid Collection of Spontaneous Speech Corpora using Telephonic Community Forums, is accepted at INTERSPEECH 2018.
May 16, 2018: Our paper, Urdu Word Segmentation using Conditional Random Fields (CRFs), is accepted at COLING 2018.
December 13, 2017: Our paper, PronouncUR: An Urdu Pronunciation Lexicon Generator, is accepted at LREC 2018.
December 11, 2017: Our paper, Baang: A Viral Speech-based Social Platform for Under-Connected Populations, is accepted at CHI 2018.
October 18, 2017: CSaLT Graduate Fellow won LDC Data Scholarship (FALL 2017).
February 13, 2017: An online version of Phonetically Rich Urdu Speech Corpus is now available.
February 13, 2017: Installation instructions and FAQs for Mehr Nastaliq Web font are now available.
February 13, 2017: Now you can test Mehr Nastaliq Web font online.
February 08, 2017: MIT Tech Review Pakistan, Geo News, Geo TV, Jang News, Dawn, ProPakistani, Morenews, Siasat.pk, Urdupoint, Neo News and Pakwired cover the release of Mehr e Nastaliq Web font for Urdu.
February 08, 2017: CSaLT releases Mehr e Nastaliq Web font for Urdu.
January 23, 2017: MIT Tech Review Pakistan, Dawn, Pakwired, ProPakistani and Samena Telecom Council cover the release of Phonetically Rich Urdu Speech Corpus.
January 19, 2017: CSaLT releases Phonetically Rich Urdu Speech Corpus.
January 18, 2017: Baang is relaunched in Pakistan and starts getting traffic without any seeding.
December 22, 2016: Polly is relaunched in Pakistan with a seeding with 7 top spreaders from the 2015-16 launch.
February 22, 2016: Baang is shut down at the completion of its pilot. Within 71 days of its launch Baang received 42,500 calls (involving 1,550 users) and accumulated 8,469 posts contributed by 888 users that were played 393,448 times (by 1,524 users). Overall, we gathered 172 hours of spontaneous speech data (106 hours of posts + 66 hours of comments) with an average recording duration of 45 seconds.
February 22, 2016: Sawal goes viral in the country, receives 8,907 calls in it's first month - with 3,176 questions and 73,467 answers.
January 2016: Voice-based quiz application Sawal is launched in Pakistan.
January 2016: The services of Baang and Polly are restarted.
December 2015: The call count of Hello Rozgar climbed to 29,614.
December 2015: Baang and Polly are stopped temporarily.
October 2015: Polly is re-launched in Pakistan.
October 2015: The voice-based news and entertainment forum Baang is launched.
October 2015: Hello Rozgar received 6,976 calls in the first two months of it's launch.
August 2015: The project Hello Rozgar is launched.
June 2015: Polly was featured on NPR's Morning Edition.
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Polly
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Phonetically Rich Urdu Speech Corpus
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