Tat Kim Bot : A twitter bot to transliterate Sanskrit

Glad to write about a twitter bot I had written and launched during the last Independence day – Tat Kim. For those who are not in the know, Tat Kim means “What’s that?” in Sanskrit – a very apt name for a Bot and allied service which answers questions of Sanskrit enthusiasts.

What does the Tat Kim Bot do?

Currently Tat Kim bot can be used to read Sanskrit tweets in your own script (Eg, Malayalam or Kannada) – there by taking away the need to know how to read Hindi (or Devanagari) to be able to consume these tweets.

Why?

Sanskrit is a pan-Indian language and it should be free from the constraints of a regional Lipi like Devanagari. Also, it helps to remember that some of the seminal works in Sanskrit were recorded not in Devanagari, but in Grantha Lipi (more or less Malayalam of our times)

Usage

If you happen to find a Sanskrit tweet from your favourite Sanskrit tweeple, comment on that tweet in the below format

@TatKimBot {languageCode}

Where language could be one from:
en, hi, bn, gu, kn, ml, or, pa, te, ta, mr

Details of Language codes:

Code	script
en	English
hi	Devanagari (Kept to support translations to Hindi at a later point of time)
bn	Bengali
gu	Gujarati
kn	Kannada
ml	Malayalam
or	Oriya
pa	Punjabi
te	Telugu
ta	Tamizh (The transliterations will be lossful due to Tamil script not being elaborate enough to represent all sounds of Sanskrit)
mr	Marathi (Kept to support translations to Marathi at a later point of time)

Example:

@TatKimBot ml
And the bot responds in 15 seconds as in the below screenshot:

Archives of the transliterations

The archives of the transliterations done by Tat Kim Bot will be available at the web portal https://tat.kim

(A sample screenshot below)

Look forward to people finding and using it during the next few months!