The Indian Institute of Technology Madras has commissioned the Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat to advance Indian language technology. The centre, which has made several cutting-edge language AI resources open source, is funded through a grant of ₹36 crore from Nilekani Philanthropies. Nandan Nilekani inaugurated the centre on Thursday.
AI4Bharat was set up as an initiative of the institute to build open-source language AI for Indian languages. Mitesh M. Khapra, Pratyush Kumar and Anoop Kunchukuttan lead the team that has developed state-of-the-art models for machine translation and speech recognition.
As part of the launch, a workshop for students, researchers and start-ups was held to discuss the resources available to build Indian language technologies. Mr. Nilekani said: “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.”
Institute director V. Kamakoti, who congratulated the team behind the centre, said he looked forward to cutting edge research being translated to real-world use.
Mr. Khapra, associate professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering in the institute, said while language technology had significantly improved for English and a few other languages, the Indian languages lagged. The Centre’s focus is to bridge the gap. The centre has made several cutting-edge resources open-source that can be accessed by anyone. The models may be downloaded from their webpage https://ai4bharat.iitm.ac.in/
