US firm Honeywell to make flying safer by decoding accents in India, says report

Honeywell International Inc. is developing a new software that will make India’s aviation sector safer by making it easier to understand English spoken by pilots with strong local accents, reported Bloomberg on Wednesday.

According to the report, the firm is developing the software at the behest of the government.

The report added that the software will decipher accents and automatically transcribe what has been said for air traffic controllers.

“One of the biggest problems in India has been that we Indians don’t understand each other’s English because of the dialects… this, we thought, works very well for the regional connectivity scheme, because you have regional pilots coming in, people don’t know what he said and what he understood,” Neelu Khatri, president of Honeywell’s aerospace business was quoted as saying in the report.

The development will be crucial to India, as the Asia's third-largest economy looks to improve air connectivity by increasing the number of airports.

India is all set to become the third-largest aviation market by 2020 and the world’s largest by 2030, the report said citing a report by the India Brand Equity Foundation.