When AI meets Bharat: Hinterland will drive India’s artificial intelligence project

Today, artificial intelligence (AI) might look like a metropolitan trend which is not even intelligible to people in the interiors, but Bharat, or the India that lives in small towns and villages and speaks in dozens of different languages and dialects, is going to be the playground for innovation in artificial intelligence (AI) in India. For AI to achieve scale in India, it would need datasets of speech, text, images and videos for training large language models in different languages. This means a massive participation of Indians who live in small towns and villages in various AI projects.

AI has several use cases and one of them is to provide access to digital services in native languages. In a country as vast as India, where people speak over 121 languages, it is a tough task to make digital services available to them in their native languages. The government is building language datasets through Bhashini, an AI-led language translation system that is creating open source datasets in local languages, for building AI tools which in return aim to deliver more services digitally.