Honeywell’s new software aims to help air traffic controllers decode Indian accents

• Honeywell is developing a new software for aviation at the request of the Indian government.
• Their linguistic software will decode pilot’s accents for air traffic controllers.
  
• If the software is successful in India, Honeywell may expand its implementation to other parts of the world.

With the world’s second highest number of languages within its purview, it’s not surprising that India is an attractive destination for Honeywell International Inc. to test their new linguistic software.

The project aims to aid communication between pilots and air traffic controllers by making it easier to understand pilots who speak English but have heavy overlaying accents. Accents are extremely diverse, especially in a country like India, which has 22 official languages and 780 languages overall.

At the request of the Government of India, the program is going to analyse accents and transcribe them for the controllers on the ground.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been pushing for more smaller airports in the country to increase connectivity. That, in turn, requires more manpower, specifically more pilots. Neelu Khatri, the president of Honeywell’s aerospace business for India, says that the move will result in more regional pilots since it’s a regional connectivity scheme.

And, therein lies the problem of accents. In an interview with Bloomberg, Khatri claims, “One of the biggest problems in India has been that we Indians don’t understand each other’s English because of the dialects.”

And that’s not too-far off the mark since past incidences have already proven that miscommunication is a global safety threat.

If the software is successfully implemented in India, it may be applied worldwide to help airports in other nations.