Govt to enhance Bhashini platform with advanced AI for multilingual digital interactions

The Digital India Bhashini Division has floated a tender for empanelment of system integrators who can develop the required system

To enable users to interact digitally in their mother tongue, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) wants to amp up the language translation platform Bhashini by developing a generative AI-based conversational system that would support input for multiple languages in both voice and text.

For this project, the government wants to leverage the existing Bhashini platform, which is powered by artificial intelligence, and enhance it with advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for ensuring accurate translations and delivering clear, contextually appropriate responses to users.

Bhashini aims to develop a national public digital platform for languages, enhancing access to content and services in various Indian languages through AI and natural language processing (NLP) technologies.

In a request for empanelment (RFE) tender floated by the Digital India Bhashini Division (DIBD), an independent division under MeitY's Digital India Corporation, the government is seeking to conduct an industry consultation for the empanelment of system integrators who can develop the required platform.

As part of the consultation, DIBD will gather feedback from potential bidders till July 17.

The proposed system

The proposed system workflow includes features such as denoiser, which would reduce background noise from voice recordings; gender classification module, which would identify the gender of the speaker.

The system would also have to automatically detect language from audio to enable appropriate translation. The system should also have automatic speech recognition, so that it can convert spoken language into text, the tender says.

Other features would include neural machine translation, which would translate text between different languages, and a profanity filter to keep out abusive words.

Increasing Bhashini adoption

To expand the adoption of Bhashini across the country, MeitY is looking to partner with educational institutions, incubators and accelerators and was seeking technical proposals from interested parties.

Selected educational institutions/incubators/accelerators will become the nodal centres for promoting Bhashini in their regions, according to request for empanelment floated by the ministry.

The selected entities will conduct research on improving accuracy and fluency of machine translation; develop domain-specific language models for government, education, healthcare and so on.

Bhashini is also planning to introduce gamified mobile applications or educational tools for its promotion and will also seek help from selected collaborators for developing it.