Mint AI Summit: How India’s taking GenAI to the hinterlands with its language database program
NEW DELHI : Bhashini, India’s national language database platform, has begun showcasing beta-stage deployment of its multi-model generative artificial intelligence services, a step towards taking the benefits of the technology to the vast majority of non-English-speaking populations. Demonstrating its abilities at the 2023 Mint AI Summit on Friday, Amitabh Nag, chief executive of Bhashini—an undertaking of the ministry of electronics and information technology (Meity)’s National Language Translation Mission—demonstrated the ability of Bhashini in conducting voice-driven contactless digital payments through UPI.
It was a demonstration of how generative AI, or GenAI, can contribute as a digital public good, and how the technology infrastructure would be crucial to the overall deployment of services in empowering various communities across economic strata. Speaking about the deployment of GenAI in the Centre-backed Bhashini platform, Nag said that a key part of these services would lie in building purpose-driven AI models.
“The specific use cases of generative AI are very narrow, and so, their datasets have to be narrow as well for us to deploy them as services very fast. The more use cases we have, the better the situation would be in terms of deriving outcomes and facilitating adoptions," Nag said.
A key challenge to this process, however, is the availability of digital datasets in regional languages. Addressing this issue, Nag said, “Many of the Indian languages don’t have digital data.
As a result, we spend around $6-7 million to collect the data." This step is also crucial in personalising services, the starting point of which begins with language databases, Nag added. The Bhashini mission, in a bid to build this up,
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