PM Modi highlights 'Bhashini' at SCO summit: Here is all you need to know about the AI-based translation tool

PM Narendra Modi virtually attending the SCO Summit held on July 4.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while addressing the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit on July 4, brought attention towards Bhashini, which is India's indigenously developed AI-based language translation tool.

"We would be delighted to share India's AI-based language platform Bhashini with everyone to remove language barriers within SCO. It can become an example of digital technology and inclusive growth," Modi said, while addressing SCO heads of state, including Russia's Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, Iran's Ebrahim Raisi and Pakistan's Shehbaz Sharif

Bhashini, the National Language Technology Mission (NLTM), was launched in July last year to provide language technology solutions as digital public goods through the platform.

The objective of the local language translation mission is to use the current technology to break down barriers between distinct Indian languages. This government portal intends to make AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) materials available in the public domain for usage by Indian MSMEs, startups, and individual innovators.

Under Digital India Corporation (DIC), an Independent Business Division (IBD), Digital India Bhashini Division (DIBD) has been established to anchor Mission Bhashini activities and to promote the language technology ecosystem, particularly startups.

The Bhashini platform now has access to over a thousand pre-trained AI models. These AI language models are also available to Bhashini ecosystem partners via Open Bhashini APIs. Through this app, one can translate a live speech into multiple local languages.

All about AI-powered Bhashini initiative

The goal is to create a community of contributors who can help towards achieving Bhashini's goals by working together. Bhashini will create an integrative architecture based on open data and open-source software principles to enable contributions from research efforts and the ecosystem. This would also encourage the ecosystem to collaborate on an integrated strategy to build varied solutions on top.

Bhashini’s ecosystem consists of central and state governments, research and academia groups, industries, start-ups, publishers, data collection and curation companies, language mission and individuals.

Contributions from stakeholders will increase the accessibility of multilingual material and allow users to utilise the internet in their native language more easily. It is an open data resource for digitally enhancing users’ language.
It is a very easy-to-use platform where one can translate anything from the local language to English and vice versa. On the website, there is a section called Anuvaad. By simply typing in one of the boxes, it will be translated to whichever language has been chosen.

Another section in the platform is Bhasha Daan that enables anyone to participate in a variety of crowdsourcing initiatives. It has four options- Suno India, Bolo India, Likho India and Dekho India. Till now, 1479, 1501, 572 and 597 people have participated in these respective activities.