Katha Karamu - Kadhaippoma

Features Katha Karamu - Kadhaippoma

Katha Karamu (කතා කරමු)—meaning "Let’s Talk"—is a Sinhala language text-to-speech communication app developed to help non-speaking individuals engage with the broader Sri Lankan community and to simplify the complex Sinhala alphabet making it easier for anyone to message in it.
The keyboard layout was later adapted to Tamil as well, with the name Kadhaippoma (கதைப்போமா).The app was created by the E.A.S.E.
Foundation in collaboration with Yaala Labs (Pvt) Ltd.
Established in 2007 by Chandima Rajapatirana, a person with non-speaking autism, his mother Anoja and family, E.A.S.E.
Foundation works to enable people with disabilities create stimulating productive lives.
An app like ‘Katha Karamu’ facilitating communication access to non-speakers fits their mission well.Non-speaking persons are often considered incapable of learning language.
The students of E.A.S.E., using innovative methods have demonstrated repeatedly that this idea is obsolete.
Each student represents a story of triumph over daunting challenges.
Communicating using mobile phones and tablets will add to their credibility and foster inclusion.Katha Karamu app, was originally created for the non-speaking students of the E.A.S.E.
Foundation who communicate by pointing to letters on a board.
It has now been expanded to help a variety of others, including deaf/mute persons who use sign language to communicate.
While there are many speech output devices for English speakers we are unaware of any such facility in Sinhala/Tamil.
This app gives access to almost the entire alphabet thereby giving unlimited and fluent communication access to the user.Deaf/mute individuals have their own difficulties negotiating their way among a society largely unversed in sign language.
Lip readers say they are hampered by mask mandates.
The ‘Katha Karamu’ app providing text-to-speech and speech-to-text is designed especially to help them.
The concept for the phonetic keyboard used in the app was created by Mrs.
Anoja Rajapatirana, who developed a chart to teach Sinhala to a group of American students from the University of Minnesota planning to spend a summer in Sri Lanka in 1970.
When she returned to Sri Lanka and started the E.A.S.E.
foundation she went back to the chart she had made 36 years ago and created a four by nine board that would enable her son Chandima to type any Sinhala word.
Chandima and the E.A.S.E.Foundation’s students have been using this for the last 15 years or so.Yaala Labs helped to turn printed boards into a mobile app with text-to-speech and speech-to-text capabilities, still utilizing the same key concepts.
The arrangement of the phonetic keyboard is far simpler to the current Sinhala/Tamil keyboard and may be adapted by other applications in the future.The ‘Katha Karamu’ app was launched on Sunday the 22nd of January at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute auditorium in an engaging and interactive event.
To learn more about E.A.S.E., please visit their website www.easesrilanka.org.