Bhashini : An Intiative by Government of India
India is a vast nation consisting of multiple cultures, religions and languages.
22 languages are recognised officially, several hundred languages are spoken across the country.
In the recent days, India has witness a rapid growth digitally, the number of smartphone users in rural areas surpassed that of urban India.
Government is focused towards developing the world’s largest digital infrastructure to connect all the 2.5 lakh Gram Panchayats of India by optical fiber and it has now already connected with 1.54 lakh Gram Panchayats.
and government is also Setting up 3.7 lakh Common Service Centres across India which will encourage digital entrepreneurship in rural areas and also improved access to digital services for common man.
so what is the problem with it ?
we have internet but it is majorly dominated with only one language that is english
India is a new and emerging digital ecosystems of the future, we must find novel ways to engage with citizens who communicate in various languages. The main objective of government is to make information available to the people in their native language in order to be a “truly” connected nation
It is essential that a shared public digital infrastructure be created to open up technologies, data, and reference models so that everyone in the ecosystem can rapidly innovate on top of the public infrastructure thus catalyzing creation of a large Indian language knowledge base and availability of diverse solutions across all domains.
With high smartphone, availability of cheap data, expanding WiFi services in villages and overall digital literacy, India has an unprecedented opportunity to create a blueprint for building the Internet for local languages.
So here comes a intiative by government
Bhashini, the BHASHa INterface for India also known as the National Language Translation Mission (NLTM), Bhashini aims to build a distinct Indian language technology platform, related services and products, by leveraging the power of artificial intelligence. Globally speech recognition and machine translation technologies have been making dramatic improvements due to Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically due deep learning technologies.
the key factor in building solutions using deep learning is the accessibility to multilingual data. India has a large amount of data available across Indian languages but in its current form it is unusable and progress in Indian languages is hampered due to the lack of availability of large amounts of high quality datasets to train state-of-the-art AI models.
it is required that curated and validated contributions should flow from varied sources, into an open source repository where it can be harnessed and put to use by the entire ecosystem.
Bhashini intends to build advanced open source datasets and models in language technologies. These will cover the areas of Input Tools, Machine Translation (MT), Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
In addition, the project will also focus on building datasets and models for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks such as Named Entity Recognition (NER), Sentiment Analysis, Question Answering (QA), Summarization in Indian Languages.
So this was all about Bhashini An Digital intiative by our government. This intative was discussed in finance budget of 2021. And government is ready with its plan they have already released a white paper of this plan
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