tamil on S Anand

MGR via ElevenLabs

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 22:31:33 +0800

I was watching Vaa Vaathiyar which has a short clip of MGR speaking. It’s either AI-generated or mimic-ed and it wasn’t bad.

I used ffmpeg to record the audio from the film, transcribed it via Gemini 3 Pro on AI Studio with the prompt:

Transcribe this into Tamil

… which gave me:

ராமு… என்ன செய்திருக்கிறாய் நீ… வாத்தியார் கேட்கிறேன் சொல் நிமிர்ந்து பார்க்க கூட தைரியம் இல்லையா… ஓடாதே… நில்…

Translation:

Ramu… What have you done… Vaathiyar (MGR) is asking, tell me Don’t you have the courage to stand up and look at me… Don’t run… stop…

(GitHub Copilot’s auto-complete translated the above for me as I typed - flawlessly. It’s getting better by the day!)

Then, I used yt-dlp to download the audio from this MGR Short Clip.

Here’s the sample:

I fed this into ElevenLabs’ Instant Voice Clone that needs just 10 seconds of audio and created an “MGR” voice.

Here’s the same dialogue in the cloned voice:

Personally, I think the ElevenLabs version is slightly better. Of course, given the pace of AI improvement, this might just be the impact of a new model release.

2 Apr 2026: Here’s the non-cloned generation from Sarvam’s text to speech with Bulbul v3 standard quality. It feels pretty weak.

Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview TTS gave me this, which feels much better.

Read Tamil on TV with Gemini

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 21:32:50 +0800

I’ve been reading books using AI. Today, I used Gemini while watching a TV show. (Not to watch TV - just while watching TV.)

There’s this scene in Iru Dhuruvam Season 2 with a sheet of paper with Tamil text on it.

The script was small and I couldn’t read it clearly. (I’m pretty slow at reading Tamil anyway.) So I took a screenshot (Linux is great that way - you can record screenshots from any video player) and asked Gemini:

OCR and translate

(I was eating dinner and had just one hand to type - minimally.)

It said:

Original Tamil Text: வினைபகை என்றிரண்டின் எச்சம் நினையுங்கால் தீயெச்சம் போலத் தெறும்

English Translation: When you consider the remnants of an incomplete action or an unconquered enemy, they will destroy you like the unextinguished remnant of a fire.

This is Thirukkural 674, written by the ancient poet Thiruvalluvar. It serves as a stark warning against leaving tasks or conflicts half-finished. Given the gloves and the torn paper, this looks like a classic cinematic trope—a cryptic, high-stakes warning left behind in a thriller, signaling that the job (or the revenge) is far from over.

Spot on. The rest of the scene made perfect sense!

This is not the first time I’ve used AI while watching TV. I’ve passed screenshots to identify cities, transcribe newspapers, and more. But this is the first time I’ve used it to read Tamil.

(BTW, the image in the screenshot above is a Gemini-upscaled with the prompt “Draw the same image, upscaled and sharper”.)

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks Pratap Vardhan – this was my best birthday gift this year!

Tamil AI

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 03:35:36 +0000

I was testing LLMs’ sense of Tamil humor with this quote:

Extend this post with more funny Tamil words that end with .ai - mentioning why they’re funny.

Chenn.ai is the artificial intelligence capital of India.
Kadal.ai
Kad.ai
Dos.ai
Vad.ai
Ad.ai
Thal.ai
Mallig.ai
Aratt.ai
And finally
Podad.ai
All spoken in namma bash.ai 😅

The Chinese models didn’t fare well.

DeepSeek made up words.

Mood.ai - An AI that perfectly captures your mood.
Sokk.ai - The AI for when you’re bored.
Thanni.ai - A hydration assistant.

Qwen too.

Kozhamb.ai - AI cooking spicy emotional support curry.
Kuttr.ai - it’s got drama and a side of gossip.
Sutta.ai - The AI that’s seen things too many things.

[Kimi](http://Click the link to view conversation with Kimi AI Assistant https://www.kimi.com/share/d3jipjcn907c4b502agg) was confused with Hindi.

Kalyan.ai - The match-making AI.
Gol.ai - rounds up to the nearest “gol” (ten).

Claude didn’t know Tamil well either.

Kumb.ai - Worships AI models every 12 years.
Thamb.ai - Younger sibling AI.
Chet.ai - The AI assistant named after the city.

ChatGPT got every word right, but has no sense of humor.

Sir.ai - “Prison.” Where you go after 15 failed CAPTCHA attempts.
Il.ai - “Leaf.” For all your “green AI” posts. 🌿
Vil.ai - “Price.” Where your token bill lives. 💸

Grok was a bit better. Got the words right and some were funny.

Mand.ai - skull-crushing smarts.
Maapill.ai - the ultimate matchmaker.
Yaan.ai - elephant-powered AI? Trunk calls incoming!

The app that really got this right was Gemini.

Tholl.ai (தொல்லை - Nuisance) - annoyance as a service.
Kaval.ai (கவலை - Worry) - AI that simulates anxiety, so you don’t have to.
Vazhukk.ai (வழுக்கை - Bald Head) - AI satellite imagery to track receding hairlines.
Aam.ai (ஆமை - Tortoise) - slow AI.
Sand.ai (சண்டை - Fight) - Discourse-as-a-Disaster service.
Sodhan.ai (சோதனை - Ordeal) - AI that exists to test your patience.

Birthday matters

Sun, 15 May 2011 20:33:23 +0000

Does it matter which month you’re born in?

Based on the results of the 20 lakh students taking the Class XII exams at Tamil Nadu over the last 3 years (via Reportbee), it appears that the month you were born in can make a difference of as much as 120 marks out of 1,200 – or 10%!

Most students who took the Class XII exams in 2011 were born between March 1991 and June 1992. The average marks of each student (out of 1200) is shown in the graph below.

Students born in June 1991 scored the lowest – around 720/1200. This suddenly shoots up in July, then in August, and the students born in September score as much as 840/1200 on average. From there on, it’s downhill.

This result is consistent across years. In 2009 and 2010, you see a similar pattern.

Why could this be?

Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers offers a clue.

Outliers opens, for example, by examining why a hugely disproportionate number of professional hockey and soccer players are born in January, February and March.

The answer turns out to be completely unrelated to numerology or astrology.

It’s simply that in Canada the eligibility cutoff for age-class hockey is January 1. A boy who turns ten on January 2, then, could be playing alongside someone who doesn’t turn ten until the end of the year—and at that age, in preadolescence, a twelve-month gap in age represents an enormous difference in physical maturity.

In Tamil Nadu, students must be 5 years old before entering Class 1. Schools open mid-June. So students born in June 1994 would barely make it in June 1999 – making them the youngest students in the class. July and August students would be missed – but since many schools implement this policy leniently, they sometimes make it in as well. September borns are often consistently the eldest students in a class.

This pattern reflected in the marks. The eldest – the September 1993 borns – score the highest. The next eldest, the October 1993 borns, score a bit less. And so on. (There are older students who take the exam – the ones born before September 1993 – but many of these are failed students from the previous year, introducing a bias in the results.)

Perhaps this initial advantage that the elder students have over their classmates continues through the years? Whatever the reason, it’s clear that if your child is born in September, he or she already has a 100 mark advantage!

Comments

abhijeet 16 May 2011 8:14 am: “Whatever the reason, it’s clear that if your child is born in September, he or she already has a 100 mark advantage!” But at the cost of being older and “losing” 8-9 months!
Shankar V 16 May 2011 10:00 am: Nice…!! Thank God I was born in July! If not on the crest, I at least made it into the upward curve! ;)
S Anand 16 May 2011 10:21 am: @abhijeet: That reminds me of the “Life is a race” dialogue in 3 Idiots :-) Well, not sure how bad being a bit older is. I personally don’t mind, but maybe others do?
Shailesh 16 May 2011 10:33 am: Oh…now I know why I was getting good marks…. :-) I am born in September…and my headmaster changed my birthdate (to Jul month) in school register to not waste my 8-9 months…..
ravi atluri 16 May 2011 10:47 am: They made me study LKG “TWICE”, because I was born in September and didn’t have enough time to be 3! and I have been an anomaly to the september-born-high-performers trend. If the marks are related to the mugging capacity, which if related to age would explain the graphs only for the schooling during. Would like to see, how would these change in college and bachelors :D One more doubt, I have is, many parents have the dob’s of after-aug-born’s to sometime between may to june. If that’s the case, the months on the graph have to be offset ;)
S Anand 16 May 2011 12:35 pm: @Shailesh – if you got into school early, then statistically, you had a DISadvantage. So guess you were MUCH brighter than your classmates! @Ravi – true. No idea how to correct for the real date of birth, though…
k 17 May 2011 2:53 am: this is similar to the paper on Israeli schools where an externally imposed rule created a disproportionate class size, which helps in identifying the effect of class size on performance. date of birth can help in identifying the effect on performance then.
Vasant 17 May 2011 6:14 am: Ha! Now I know why I scored so less in the boards. It’s when I was born! :-) Jokes aside, brilliant analysis.
Sathya 17 May 2011 6:43 am: Good One ! If you still have access to data, would it be possible to plot the same graph against their “numerology numbers” ? ie., 28th born would be 2+8 = 10 => 1+0 = 1. I used to wonder that astrology ( perhaps numerology ) could provide certain insights and that it astro/numero predictions should be verified using statistics. ( Pls note that I do not suggest astro determines a person’s fate. But perhaps it can predict events with some accuracy. How a person reacts to those events are not in the realm of astrology). I would love to do this if I had access to the data. In case you find it worthwhile, it would be interesting to see if numero number matters at all !
Swetha 19 May 2011 9:34 am: M a September born and a gold medalist . (*Grins*)
Sumit Dhar 21 May 2011 3:36 am: And, I know this is extremely difficult, but was wondering if it would be possible to assess the impact of month in which you were born on your professional growth / salary growth. Or even more simply, if marks are correlated with professional success. We Indians tend to believe that good marks == success at work. Would love to know if data validates this belief. If only this kind of data were available… Maybe HR teams in organizations could perform such an assessment. Cheers, D.
Vish 16 Aug 2011 9:59 am: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8227268.stm Summer-borns tend to lose out at school because, in England and Wales, 1 September is the cut-off date for school entry, so they can be up to a year younger than their classmates. June baby Frank Lampard Research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies two years ago found only 53% of girls and 47% of boys born in August reached the expected educational level at age seven in state primary schools in England, compared with 80% and 70% of those born in September. Their sporting prowess is affected too. Older children tend to be bigger and more confident, receive more encouragement, and their advantage grows over time. For unto everyone who hath shall be given. Among the 25 most capped England football players, 11 were born between September and November, while only one, Frank Lampard, was born between June and August. In his case, having an England international for a father probably outweighed the disadvantage. So for educational and sporting opportunities, the cruellest and kindest months sit next to each other in the calendar like resentful neighbours.

Tamil spelling corrector

Tue, 01 May 2007 12:00:00 +0000

The Internet has a lot of tamil song lyrics in English. Finding them is not easy, though. Two problems. The lyrics are fragmented: there’s no one site to search them. And Google doesn’t help. It doesn’t know that alaipaayudhe, alaipaayuthe and alaipayuthey are the same word.

This is similar to the problem I faced with tamil audio. The solution, as before, is to make an index, and provide a search interface that is tolerant of English spellings of Tamil words. But I want to go a step further. Is it possible to display these lyrics in Tamil?

My Tamil Transliterator does a lousy job of this. Though it’s tolerant of mistakes, it’s ignorant of spelling and grammer. So,

kanda nal muthalai kathal peruguthadi

… becomes…

kanda nal muthalai kathal peruguthadi

… when in fact we want…

kanda naaL muthalaay kaathal peruguthadi

(If you’re viewing this on an RSS reader, check my post to see what I mean.)

I need an automated Tamil spelling corrector. Reading Peter Norvig’s “How to Write a Spelling Corrector” and actually having understood it, I gave spelling correction in Tamil a shot.

Norvig’s approach, in simple terms, is this:

Get a dictionary
Tweak the word you want to check (add a letter, delete one, swap 2 letters, etc.)
Pick all tweaks that get you to a valid word on the dictionary
Choose the most likely correction (most common correct word, adjusted for the probability of that mistake happening)

Making a dictionary is easy. I just need lots of Tamil literature, and then I pick out words from it. For now, I’m just using the texts in Project Madurai.

Tweaking the word to check is easy. Norvig’s article has a working code example.

Picking valid tweaks is easy. Just check against the dictionary.

The tough part is choosing the likely correction. For each valid word, I need the probability of having made this particular error.

Let’s take an example. I’ve spelt kathal. A list of valid tweaks to this word include: kal, kol, kadal, kanal, and kaadhal. For each of these, I need to figure out how often the valid tweaks occur, and the probability that I typed kathal when I really meant one of these tweaks. This is what such a calculation would look like:

Tweak	Frequency	Probability of typing kathal	Product
kal	1	0.04	0.04
kol	4	0.02	0.08
kadal	10	0.1	1.0
kanal	1	0.01	0.01
kaadhal	6	0.25	1.50

Once we have this, we can see that kaadhal is the right one – it has the maximum value (1.50) in the last column, where we multiply the frequency and the probability.

(You probably realise how small my dictionary is, looking at the frequencies. Well, that’s how big Project Madurai is. But increasing the size of a dictionary is a trivial problem.)

Anyway, getting the frequency is easy. How do I get the probabilities, though? That’s what I’m working on right now.

Comments

SDW 1 May 2007 9:01 am: Hi there, with regards to ‘Thendral Ennai Mutham Itathu’ as described on http://www.s-anand.net/blog/classical-ilayaraja/, the female voice was not SPS but B.S. Sasirekha. fyi please.
ரவிசங்கர் 4 May 2007 5:33 pm: நல்ல முயற்சி, அணுகுமுறை.
Ravi 11 May 2007 2:36 pm: Good article. I am very interested in text analysis, phrase extraction too (and statistical machine translation, if you will :) Is not probability just the number of occurences of each of these divided by total number of occurence? Maybe I am missing something. Did you also consider using Vikatan or Kumudam article data in addition to Project Madurai to get contemporary word counts and probabilities? It is one of my projects to create a word frequency list for Tamil. Now that I see another active soul, I might start the project :) Python or ruby I am wondering…
kooliip 1 May 2007 12:00 pm: meaning for saroja sama nikalo
GANESH 1 May 2007 12:00 pm: I LOVE YOU SUJA CHELLAM
hajaroz@yahoo.com 1 May 2007 12:00 pm: please give me that spelling checking software….it is very good and it is new one
v.arul 14 Aug 2008 6:39 am: Give me the correct tamil spelling for unnippaga
shamu 10 Sep 2008 12:17 am: தமிழ்லில் எழுதுவதற்கு முய்ற்சி
ந்ன்றி
nita 29 Dec 2009 3:39 pm: hi i would like to know if there are any resources online which would help me to check if my spellings in tamil typing are right? i am not very confortable with tamil so i can use the help of spell check, i would be most greatful! kindly help, thanks:)
prabhu 13 Aug 2011 8:43 am: Hi anand, Do you have any tamil spell checker tool online. If yes, please provide the link asap. Thanks in advance.
thamizh selvan 19 Mar 2011 4:09 pm: i want to know the exact spelling of thamizh selvan in tamil . whether a connecting letter will come between thamizh and selvan or not .. thank you
chandroo 19 Aug 2012 6:02 am: I need a Tamil spell checking software.Please tell me.
saranraj 1 Jan 2013 9:00 am: Please let me know the correct spelling for the tamil word “Nadathanum”.
Muthu 29 Apr 2015 5:37 am: You may do easy text processing of Tamil content using open-tamil library in Python. $ pip install open-tamil To convert your data into Tamil letters (not Unicode code-points) you can type in Python,

import tamil letters = tamil.utf8.get_letters( data ) Thanks, -Muthu

Google search in Tamil

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 12:00:00 +0000

When I wrote my Tamil song lyrics quizzes, I had two problems:

I can't write in Tamil (not on paper, nor on a computer)
I can't spell right in Tamil (ந vs ன, ர vs ற)

I overcame the first using a Tamil transliterator. I write in English, and you see it in Tamil.

The problem of ந vs ன was simple. ந occurs as the first letter of a word, and just before த. Nowhere else. (Is this always true?)

But ர vs ற can't be solved except through experience, and I'm short of that. So, rather than bother my family with every quiz, I used the wisdom of crowds. I googled both spellings of the word. The correct spelling has more Google hits than the incorrect one.

I did this so often, I made a Google gadget out of it.

Just type the word in English, click 'Search', and my gadget will search in tamil. It's amazing how much stuff there is in Tamil on the Web, from song lyrics to texts (thirukkuraL, for example).

You can add this gadget to:

your desktop (in the Search Gadgets box, type "http://www.s-anand.net/a/tamilsearchgadget.xml")
your website or blog (click here for the code)
Google Reader.

Here's the transliteration table:

Tamil	English
அ	a
ஆ	A or aa
இ	i
ஈ	I or ee
உ	u
ஊ	U or oo
எ	e
ஏ	E
ஐ	ai
ஒ	o
ஓ	O
ஔ	au
க	k or g
ங	n
ச	ch or s
ஜ	j
ஞ	n
ட	t or d
ண	N
த	th or dh
ந	n
ப	p or b
ம	m
ய	y
ர	r
ல	l
வ	v
ழ	zh
ள	L
ற	R
ஷ	sh
ஸ	S
ஹ	h

Comments

Madhu 7 Oct 2006 6:27 am: You should be at google:) and google is now considering buying youtube - remember when i posted a comment once, you said why will they buy:)
S Anand 7 Oct 2006 11:01 am: Yeah, I remember the comment. Good call! Guess YOU’re the one who should be at Google :-)
oskar lewis 7 Oct 2006 12:57 pm: I’ ve put some links on my blog that can help you translating… http://www.oskarlewis.com/weblog/archives/1317
Vasant 7 Oct 2006 5:39 pm: Hi, guess something’s wrong with your RSS feeds.. they don’t seem to reflect your latest posts
S Anand 7 Oct 2006 6:20 pm: Vasant, I subscribe to my own RSS feeds. They seem fine. Are you subscribing to http://feeds.feedburner.com/sanand? Which RSS reader are you using? And what’s the latest post you see?
Vasant 8 Oct 2006 4:43 am: I was subscribing to http://www.geocities.com/root_node/sanand.xml. Works fine with the other URL. Will change - Thanks
Madhu 9 Oct 2006 11:40 am: Not able to download the gadget though. not available in google gadgets as well. would you have a link? Hope google scans ur page and reports that youtube was my idea and look at my email and automatically send me an offer;)
S Anand 9 Oct 2006 12:02 pm: That’s funny, the links in the post work for me… This link should add it to your Google home page. Don’t think you can “download” it, though. You can at best add it to Google Desktop.
Madhu 12 Oct 2006 8:18 am: Ok. Am able to download it as a gadget though. It says add to webpage.
Madhu 17 Oct 2006 11:01 am: This is an interesting website - www.blinkx.com, unlike youtube and google video you can search for a variety of video sources here. Might be bought out by one of the GYM companies soon!
Kesavan.M 30 Oct 2006 10:05 am: Thanks.., No more words
Sudar 4 Jan 2007 10:15 am: It is fine that you did this gadget. I liked it very much. Any such project it pipeline. Can you give this transliteration table in table form?
Sanjai Gandhi 14 Feb 2007 1:53 pm: its a genius thing…amazing…
Sathuragiri vEL 26 Feb 2007 4:30 am: You can have a look at www.tise.velirs.com. We use a simialar approach but has made it more simpler.
saravanan 18 Mar 2007 5:10 am: please help me how to conducts seminar about liver enzymes in liver cancer help from introduction to conclution
ரவிசங்கர் 4 May 2007 5:25 pm: நல்ல Gadget. ஆனா, பலம்-பழம், கள - கல் போன்ற வேறுபாடுகளை அறிய இந்த கூகுள் அணுகுமுறை உதவாது :) தமிழ் அகரமுதலிகள் தான் உதவும். பார்க்க - http://blog.ravidreams.net/?p=152
thuvan 30 Oct 2008 12:29 pm: we can’t convert from Tamil word to English word
tamil priyan 21 May 2009 7:09 pm: Check out http://kandupidi.com/editor . It supports both google tranliteration as well as english phonetic typing as well which many people prefer. There is a gadget for this as well.
John Francis 25 Oct 2011 11:34 am: finding very hard to browse in tamil and i wish to have DEMO SCREEN TO download the steps to use them immeaditely

Making a Tamil transliterator

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 12:00:00 +0000

I've built a simple Tamil transliterator. You can type in words in English and it will spell them out in Tamil. You can copy-paste the Tamil above into Microsoft Word, etc.

You may need to turn on tamil scripts to see the Tamil fonts above. If you have Windows 98, it may not work well. If you've visited this page recently, you will need to refresh this page as well (press F5).

Browse through my Javascript to see how it works. Feel free to reuse.

I've also made a Google Gadget that searches Google in Tamil using this tool.

Here's what to type:

Tamil	English
அ	a
ஆ	A or aa
இ	i
ஈ	I or ee
உ	u
ஊ	U or oo
எ	e
ஏ	E
ஐ	ai
ஒ	o
ஓ	O
ஔ	au
க	k or g
ங	n
ச	ch or s
ஜ	j
ஞ	n
ட	t or d
ண	N
த	th or dh
ந	n
ப	p or b
ம	m
ய	y
ர	r
ல	l
வ	v
ழ	zh
ள	L
ற	R
ஷ	sh
ஸ	S
ஹ	h

I also have a gadget that lets you search in Tamil.

Comments

Arun 31 Aug 2006 8:29 am: Very cool. Why the UI change?
S Anand 31 Aug 2006 10:55 am: Mostly because I wanted to shift focus from “linking” to “writing”.
Sathya 31 Aug 2006 11:06 am: wow … the commenting is back ! great ! In my spare time I would test this and if possible enhance the transtamil. Currently “Aiyya” does not get transliterated and so on.
S Anand 31 Aug 2006 4:19 pm: Try ‘aiyya’ with the small ‘a’. That works. I am allowing only lowercase except for long vowels.
Arun 1 Sep 2006 6:23 am: Ah, ok. Just a suggestion. Maybe you could use up more of the screen width? Lot of screen real-estate is not used currently (at least, on Firefox), so there’s a lot of scrolling (down) to do.
S Anand 1 Sep 2006 7:13 am: Arun, I thought a lot about this. While this makes it tougher on people who visit my site a lot, most newcomers find a linear flow easier. Since 90% of the traffic to my site is newcomers (most regular readers use RSS), I thought it best to design it this way. Just curious – what do you scroll down for? The links?
Arun 1 Sep 2006 11:55 am: I scrowl down for the links, yes. Actually, I don’t check all of them out when I first see your updates. Usually, return 2-3 times a day, when I am more in the mood to read. I sometimes tend to return to your old posts 4-5 days later. Also, I was a bit confused about the separation between the links and your writings. I didn’t realize that till you explained in your previous comment. Actually, I see your updates on google reader, but for whatever reason, I check your page too. Don’t know why I do that! :-)
sathish 21 Sep 2006 3:59 am: very nice anand. Thank you.
Vidya 6 Oct 2006 5:42 am: how can i get sri?
Vidya 6 Oct 2006 5:45 am: got it.. Dont bother to reply
RMurali 20 Nov 2006 7:06 pm: Dear Anand, I got to know your site while searching London on youtube videos. you are doing a good job. keep it up !
Victor 17 Jan 2007 10:21 pm: try aeiou as a word. remains as aeiou. Seems to be a method to the madness since these are all vowels
venkatachalam 18 Jan 2007 4:46 pm: thsi is very nice.can you please tell me which free software help me to do this transliteration.pl mail to bvchalam1946@gmail.com
Siva Prasadh 12 Apr 2007 3:28 pm: Its very useful i like it very much
senthil 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: its good buddy.. very easy…
sridhar 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: Superappu…..!
sriram 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: how do you write the character ‘akk’? (Aaytha ezhuthu), as in ‘fa’ inn faathima?
meenakshi 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: great tool!! checked it and worked very well, only issue i had was i could not figure out how to get the nya working, as in kavinyar.
Kavitha 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: Ur site is simply excellent. Very very useful for Tamilians….Tamil Patru Ullavanga across the world.
ராஜ் தொழில்நுட்பம்.com 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: வணக்கம் ஐயா,
தமிழ் எண்கள் க, உ ஆகியவை செயல்படுத்தச்செய்தால் மிக நன்று. இருந்தாலும் மிக அருமை.
இங்ஙனம், ராஜ்
thozhilnutpam.com; geocities.com/tamildictionary
RAAJARAM K 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: மிக அருமை. இண்டெர்னெட் ல் இல்லாத போது உபயோகிப்பது எவ்வாறு என்று தெரிவித்தால் நன்றாக இருக்கும்.

Matching misspelt Tamil movie names

Fri, 09 Dec 2005 12:00:00 +0000

I don’t like hunting for new songs either. Too much effort.

External recommendations like Raaga Top 10 help, but not much. I usually like only 1 of the top 10.

I don’t really know the recent music directors. But many interesting songs I’ve heard recently (like Ondra Renda in Kakka Kakka, Vaseegara in Minnale, and Kaadhalikkum in Chellame) are by Harris Jayaraj. So maybe if I can find the music directors I like, other songs by them would be good recommendations.

I have an automated way to find the music director for a movie. First, I spent a few hours renaming my MP3s to a Movie.Song.mp3 filename format (using Excel and Perl liberally). After that, I wrote a Perl program that reads movie names and the movie directors from Raaga and matches the Raaga movie names with my movie names. (Raaga has all but 5 movies whose songs I’ve heard.) Then I rate music directors based on my songs’ ratings.

Unfortunately, the matching worked only for 45% of my 273 movies. The rest were spelt differently on my list and Raaga. I checked CPAN if there was a way to match Tamil words roughly. The closest was Lingua::Phonology, but Jesse, the author, mailed me saying that was “like slicing your bread with a chainsaw”.

So I developed these rules. The -> arrow below is to be read as “is also spelt as”. By just applying them sequentially, I matched 33% more movies.

Vowel rules
AEdhiri -> Edhiri
kadhal kondEIn -> kadhal kondEn
chellamEY at end-> chellamE
sachIEn -> sachIn
marupadIUm -> marupadIYUm
OI, OY, OVI, OYI are all the same
AAthma -> Athma
azhagiya thEEye -> azhagiya thIye
abOOrva ragam -> abUrva ragam
Ignore H. It is redundant.

Consonant rules
arasakTCHi -> arasakSHi
CHippikkul muthu -> Sippikkul muthu
thenNDRal -> thenNRal
devar maHan -> devar maGan
bagaWathi -> bagaVathi
avvai shanmuGi -> avvai shanmuKi
konJi pesalam -> konCHi pesalam
anDha 7 naatkal -> anTha 7 naatkal
aBoorva sagodharargal -> aPoorva sagodharargal
agni natchaTHIRam -> agni natchaTHRam

The remaining movies either had spelling mistakes (e.g. Kilipethcu Ketkavaa) or had structural differences (Ilamai Oonjal Aadugiradhu vs Ilamai Oonjal Aadudhu). By permitting approximate matches using String::Approx, I was able to match 12% more, making my total accuracy ~90%.

Though this is good enough for identifying music directors, I’m working on improving the approximate matching rules. I hope to have 98% accuracy, and then I can match individual songs – and know who the singers are. Hopefully, this can be extended to other sites like MusicIndiaOnline, and who knows – maybe even IMDb.

Comments

Ashwin 10 Dec 2005 3:36 am: I use www.arthika.net for downloading high quality MP3’s. Their song ratings are good. This is my strategy.
S Anand 12 Dec 2005 6:55 pm: I tried it out… maybe it was just me, but I thought they had a smaller collection than Raaga. Is that right?
Ashwin 18 Dec 2005 6:41 am: Ya, They have only a small collection but he quality of the songs are very good.
Bala 9 Dec 2005 12:00 pm: Can you make the script you made downloadable for folks to normalize their unwieldy MP3 library? Even 80% would do for me considering the amount of chaos that prevails! :) Thanks

Tamil nationalism a moderating force to religious politics

Mon, 23 Sep 2002 12:00:00 +0000

Interesting article: suggests that Tamil nationalism a moderating force to religious politics.

Google speaks Klingon

Wed, 06 Feb 2002 12:00:00 +0000

Google speaks Klingon, Hacker, Hindi, Tamil, and several other new languages. (Be careful about the “Save preferences” button, if you picked a language you don’t understand.)