Google announces AI projects in Indian languages, agri

NEW DELHI/BENGALURU: Google India on Monday announced AI projects and collaborations in the areas of language, agriculture, and healthcare.

The company has partnered with IISc, Bangalore, on Project Vaani, to gather speech data across all 773 districts of India. “Instead of language-based collection of data, we turned it on its head, we are doing a region-wise collection of data from 773 districts. All this data is made available in open source to startups, companies, researchers, and students,” said Manish Gupta, director of research at Google India.

Gupta said two years ago, it had built a model called Mural to provide large coverage to 16 Indian languages. “In the next big leap, this will cover 100 languages.