AI Alliance Pune: Bhashini to enable voice commands in native languages for mobile recharges, bill payments

Moneycontrol's Chandra Srikanth in conversation with MeitY's Amitabh Nag and Yotta's Sunil Gupta at the AI Alliance Summit in Pune on March 27

Soon, one can may be able to give voice commands in their native languages in an app to recharge mobiles, FasTag and pay gas bills!

By the end of April this year, the Indian government is aiming to expand its Bhashini initiative, an AI-led language translation system, to more use cases such as recharging mobile phones, paying gas bills and so on , CEO of Digital India Bhashini Division Amitabh Nag said at the CNBC TV18- Moneycontrol AI Alliance event held in Pune on March 27.

Last year, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) collaborated with Bhashini to launch Hello! UPI, a voice-enabled UPI payments feature.

"We will be launching Mobile Recharge Kardo, FasTag Charge Kar Do, Gas Bill Pay Kar Do -- We are working on all of these use cases. We are training the models," Nag said. The DIBD CEO was speaking at a panel "Deep Dive : India's AI edge" along with Sunil Gupta, co-founder and CEO, Yotta Data Services.

"We are 80 per cent on track to training the models. We were targeting March 31, but now we are targeting April 15 or April 30 to be in the market with all these use cases," he added.

In total, Nag said that the government is working on 50 such use cases. For instance, in judiciary, the DIBD is working on translating judgement documents, and also FIRs that have been filed in local languages.

Bhashini shot into limelight last year when Prime Minister Narendra Modi used the platform to live translate a speech that he was giving in Hindi to Tamil. Nag described, the live speech translation, as the most complicated among all of Bhashini's offerings (voice-to-text, document translation and so on)

"PM Modi used the most difficult part of our entire breadth portofilio of offering Bhashini -- simultaneous speech translation... When PM Modi used it (simultaneous language translation), we had promised about 6 seconds of delay (for the translation to occur). But now, there is just 1 second of delay," Nag said.

The DIBD CEO said this after providing a live demonstration of the live speech translation where Nag spoke in English, and the Bhashini platform translated it in real time into Marathi for the audience in Pune.

In conclusion, Nag said that the government will be collaborating with startups more in regards to Bhashini.

"We are going to organise multiple hackathons, grand challenges on each of Bhashini activities. Bhashini's products such as video translation, speech to speech, document translation are done by startups," he added.