Multiplatform Mobile App for Multilingual OCR Based Translator for Tamil (MMOT)

In an increasingly interconnected world, language barriers can pose significant challenges for communication and cultural understanding. This is particularly true for tourists from revolving around Tamil region, who may find it difficult to communicate with people in other parts of India or abroad. To address this issue, we have developed a Multiplatform application (Eke et al. 2019) using Kotlin (Moskala et al. 2017) that uses machine learning to identify text in images and translate it to Tamil (Nedumaran et al. 2009). The app leverages the power of the Google ML Kit and the Google Translate API to provide accurate and reliable translations in real-time. It is designed to be user-friendly and intuitive, with various features that make it a valuable tool for tourists and anyone who needs to communicate with Tamil speakers or understand written Tamil text. Additionally, the app includes the ability to change its language to Tamil and uses a 3rd party library for taking pictures either from the gallery or camera, with editing capabilities. The app was evaluated through testing with a group of users and in a hackathon, where it demonstrated its effectiveness in translating text to Tamil. The motive behind choosing this project was to help Tamil oriented people freely roam and experience cultures without feeling any language barrier. In this paper, we describe the design and development of the application, discuss our methodology for evaluating its performance, and present our results and future work.