The Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat was given a contract by the Indian Institute of Technology Madras to enhance Indian language technology. The centre is supported by a donation of 36 crore rupees from Nilekani Philanthropies, which it used to open source a number of cutting-edge language AI resources. The centre was opened by Nandan Nilekani on Thursday.
The institute launched AI4Bharat as a project to provide open source language AI for Indian languages. Modern methods for speech recognition and machine translation have been created by a team led by Mitesh M. Khapra, Pratyush Kumar, and Anoop Kunchukuttan.
A workshop was given as part of the launch to go over the tools available to develop Indian language technology for students, researchers, and start-ups. Nilekani stated: “The digital India Bhashini mission has been launched with the goal of all services and information being available to citizens in their own language with “collaborative AI” at the core of the design. AI4Bharat will accelerate the Indic language AI work as a public good and is fully aligned with the goals of the Bhashini mission.”
Institut head V. Kamakoti expressed his excitement for the application of cutting-edge research to practical applications while congratulating the team behind the centre.
Mr. Khapra, an associate professor at the institute’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering, claimed that while English and a few other languages had seen major advancements in language technology, Indian languages had fallen behind. The goal of the Center is to close the gap. The centre has made a number of state-of-the-art resources accessible to everyone as open source.
