OSS support for Croatian language

I was just looking at the Asterisk open source PBX and one of the features of that software is possibility of integration with Festival. Festival is a text to speech synthesis software, freely available on the Internet! And it's quite good piece of software. Using only Festival, or Festival in combination with some other application, like Asterisk, interesting services could emerge.

Now, we come to the point! I searched for possibility to use Croatian language in that application. And guess what, there is no application that supports it. There are quite few application for speech synthesis and none of them, you guessed, has support for Croatian! Actually, there is possibility of adding Croatian to those software using generic support but it's far from usefull.

So, this made me think a bit! What the hell is Croatian Ministry of Sciences and whatever else doing!? Shouldn't at least they care about this aspect of development? Shouldn't they try to invest some money in development of such software? Shouldn't they put out some tender searching for interested parties that would develop such software? Also, the license of that software should be such that afterwards this software could be used in both, open source and commercial applications, e.g. some BSD style license. And not only there is a problem with software for speech synthesis. There's no OCR capable software, syntax and grammar checking are also not well supported, if supported at all, and to talk about voice recognition is to much!

Speaking of syntax checking, thanks to enthusiasts there is some support in open source office applications, but much remains to be done and I believe that investment in that respect would help, but would help to Croatian language – and I believe that's important to the Government and also to the aforementioned Ministry.

“You will work on the newest technologies”

The title of this entry is actually taken from one ad searching for prospective students to work in a Croatian telecom after graduating. Actually, ad itself is very cleverly thought out and I have to give credit to the one who thought of it. But, there is always doubt that it was actually “taken” from someone else...

What's important about this sentence is how little it actually says and how misleading it is. To work on the newest technologies is very attractive, but, the secretaries working on Word 2007, or whatever latest version is, are also working on the newest technologies! So, in order to find out what this sentence really means, I'm going to dissect it a bit. But before I continue let me stress one thing. I'm talking about average case, and correspondingly, it might be true for the particular telecom, but it also might be false!

The hart of the problem is that the reality of Croatia is the fact that there is almost no development, and everything boils down to giving services and selling something. So, the phrase working on the newest technologies means actually configuring devices or application software products, and if you are particularly unlucky, to sell them! And what is so attractive of being user and/or seller instead of being engineer?! I suppose that students enrolled in electrical engineering and/or computer science courses because they don't treat themselves as users.

Now, you might say that by configuring this devices, or application software, one is actually using it as a tool and doing something new! But let's try again, when we are talking about telecom - and the others are more or less the same, the marketing department is the one who says that company needs another service/product/whatever. Engineering department then reads manuals of available equipment and their capabilities and configures it so that requested service is implemented! Now, where's development in that process?!

And one related thing, namely, there are a plenty of different ads seeking employees and offering work on newest technologies, while the truth is, when you start working, you are only allowed to look into this equipment (if there is any) and, because it is used in production environment, you are not allowed to play with it!

So, to conclude, working on the newest technology in Croatia isn't so exciting for an engineer as it might sound at first.