Google and Microsoft bet on 27-year-old Stanford alum to make AI work for a billion users

In her one-room home on a quiet street in Agara, a tiny village three hours southwest of Bangalore that’s fringed by rice paddies and groundnut fields, Preethi P. sits on a stool near a sewing machine. Normally, she would spend hours mending or stitching clothes, averaging less than $1 a day for her work. On this day, however, she is reading a sentence in her native Kannada language into an app on a phone.

She pauses briefly, then reads another.

Preethi, who goes by a single name, as is common in the region, is among the 70 workers hired in Agara and neighboring villages by a startup called Karya to gather text, voice and image data in India’s vernacular languages.