Fwd: Looking for volunteers to help make Telugu learning more accessible

[CU Telugu Sangam]

Hello CU Telugu Sangam,

Please find below Requirement from University,If any one interested  To  Volunteer pls contact.

If you know anyone from anywhere can help pls forward.

Thanks 

Charitha 

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Eklavya Sharma <eku...@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Sep 18, 2025 at 3:00 PM
Subject: Looking for volunteers to help make Telugu learning more accessible
To: <igsa...@gmail.com>, Kundan <kme...@illinois.edu>, Yashna <yash...@illinois.edu>, <cu.telug...@gmail.com>

Dear IGSA, UIUC Telugu Student Sangam, and CUTeS,

I’m Eklavya, a PhD student at UIUC. I’m leading an effort to make a completely free and open source web app to help people learn Telugu (link to prototype). I'm looking for volunteers who can read and speak Telugu. Can you please share this email with people in your respective organizations, and ask them to reach out to me if they are interested?

I’m from Delhi and I started learning Telugu a few months ago. But it’s been difficult. Popular languages like French, German, and Japanese, have many resources to learn them (courses, apps, etc.), but Telugu has very few resources. So, I decided to do something about this unfortunate situation. I found an excellent 30-year-old book (as a scanned PDF) by a Telugu linguist for learning Telugu, but being a book it doesn’t help with listening skills. So, my plan is to type it in Telugu and use text-to-speech programs to speak it out. Generally, I’m skeptical of AI technologies for Indian languages. I don’t trust machine translation, but text-to-speech seems to be good enough, based on feedback from Telugu friends. You can check out my prototype app here: https://sharmaeklavya2.github.io/narrator-ws/. The app's text-to-speech functionality currently only works on Android and macOS, and not on Windows or iOS. See my post on r/telugu for details.

Typing the whole book by myself would be very difficult. Hence, I’m looking for volunteers. I asked for help on r/telugu, but I didn’t get many responses. Please share this email with members of your organization, or others you know who may want to volunteer. Volunteering involves reading the scanned PDF and typing out the sentences into a spreadsheet (detailed instructions). With enough volunteers, we can make it easier for people to learn Telugu!

volunteers that they can contact me either by email at ekurgn@gmail or on WhatsApp at +1 217-377-5792. 

Thanks a lot for your help!

Regards,
Eklavya

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ధన్యవాదములు, 

CU తెలుగు సంఘం వెబ్ కమిటీ 

cu.telug...@gmail.com

cu_telug...@googlegroups.com

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[G A Naidu]

He updated me and said there are 42 chapters. Can we group at temple on Saturday next week may be ten of us and help him out.  It is going to be a free app. 

Can someone create a Google sheet and we will ask people to sign up?  We can meet around 3pm and complete it.  I will bring snacks.

Thanks
G. A. Naidu

On Fri, Jan 30, 2026 at 8:33 AM G A Naidu <adik...@5yatra.org> wrote:

I contacted Ekalya.  He wants transliteration of Telugu book.  If he doing as nonprofit work, we can all meet at temple one day and help him out with one chapter each.  I wrote to him and waiting for response 

Thanks
G. A. Naidu

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[G A Naidu]

I contacted Ekalya.  He wants transliteration of Telugu book.  If he doing as nonprofit work, we can all meet at temple one day and help him out with one chapter each.  I wrote to him and waiting for response 

Thanks
G. A. Naidu

On Wed, Jan 28, 2026 at 9:21 AM CU Telugu Sangam <cu.telug...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[ravi maturi]

Sure sir . I also contacted him and he said the same thing. Let us meet at the temple

Thanks 

Ravi 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cu_telugu_sangam/CAAoBOV%3Dx_ZCSYn0KxJ4Nzdbb8cRnj4P8NrWXnAxUF%2B4hdVnujg%40mail.gmail.com.