and Computer Technology (NECTEC) under National Science and Technology Development Authority (NSTDA), Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), Thailand. The Working Committee Meeting is being held annually on alternate basis based on the MoU signed between DIT and NECTEC on May 4, 2007. Besides this meeting Her Excellency will also visit National Environment Commission (NEC), Renewal Natural Resource – Research Centre (RNR-RC), Yusipang, Bio-diversity Centre, Serbithang under the Ministry of Agriculture and the Institute of Traditional Medicine. The overriding and singular objective of the MoU is to promote research collaboration in the fields of electronics, computer, telecommunications and information technologies based on the principles of reciprocity, mutual understandings and greater benefits to both the entities. The MoU, in short, covers collaboration activities such as exchange of visit of researchers and experts, exchange of relevant scientific and technological information, consultation for research and development and other mutually agreed activities. Objective of the Third Working Committee Meeting The main objective of the meeting is to assess, review and plan future research collaboration activities, resolve issues hindering the implementation of mutually agreed research activities, and to further deepen the ties of friendship, understandings and goodwill between two countries. Status of Collaboration As of today, two rounds of bilateral working committee meetings were held between the parties. The first Working Committee Meeting was held in Thimphu on September 8, 2007 and the second Working Committee Meeting was held in NECTEC, Thailand on December 19-22, 2008. At the institutional, so far, NECTEC provided expertise and logistics to train our researchers in areas of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Text-to-Speech Synthesizer (TTS), e-governance security, Phonetics and Phonology, Morphology and Grammar Analysis, Morpho-Syntactic Analysis, Annotation and other related research activities. At the professional and individual level, NECTEC and DIT researchers exchange scientific and technological information, share knowledge and skills on specific disciplines – this happens on continuous basis - through electronic correspondences, online messaging and through phone calls. Research Collaboration Activities between DIT and NECTEC Optical Character Recognition Optical character recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, is the mechanical or electronic translation of images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text (usually captured by a scanner) into machine-editable text. As most Dzongkha text are in print or hand-written forms, there is minimal Dzongkha digital text which could be used for language processing and analysis. Development of OCR will help us to Dzongkha digital text from the printed books, newspapers and other media. Text-to-speech Synthesis Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into speech; other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech. Synthesized speech can be created by concatenating pieces of recorded speech that are stored in a database. Systems differ in the size of the stored speech units; a system that stores phones or diphones provides the largest output range, but may lack clarity. For specific usage domains, the storage of entire words or sentences allows for high-quality output. Alternatively, a synthesizer can incorporate a model of the vocal tract and other human voice characteristics to create a completely "synthetic" voice output.