The government is seriously considering its efforts to strengthen the local alternative to Google’s language translation services. A platform called ‘Bhashini’ was announced this year and now the government recently included ‘Bhashini’ in its Digital India expansion plans with a budget of Rs 14,903 crore.

Bhashini claims to be an “AI-enabled” multilingual translation tool that currently supports 10 major Indian languages, and with government support, the platform will soon support all 22 official Indian languages. This project is part of the government’s broader national language translation task.

What does Bhashini do?

While the main focus is on seamless language translation, the Bhashini platform aims to make the internet accessible to everyone in all 22 Indian languages. Based on machine translation, automatic speech recognition, optical character recognition, text-to-speech and other technologies, the platform mainly aims to help Indians get search results and browse the internet in any language. In other words, knowing English is not a barrier for Indians who want to use the Internet.

ChatGPT will soon become more powerful: here’s how

There is no denying that government online services and apps already offer the ability to browse in major Indian languages, but there is still a huge gap that needs to be covered. English still dominates somewhat as translation services for all Indian languages are not yet reliable. Another aspect is that Bhashini aims to provide translation services between different Indian languages as well – you can expect to get a real-time translation from Hindi to Telugu or even Bengali to Manipuri.

The platform tries to bring together government and central government stakeholders as well as startups, technology companies, publishers, universities and even private individuals. Currently, there is a tool called Anuvaad that helps with both text and speech translation.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently unveiled the Bhashini platform at the G20 Digital Economy Working Group Ministerial Meeting to showcase India’s prowess as a testing ground for technological innovation. The Prime Minister said, “We are building ‘Bhashini’, an AI-based language translation platform. It will support digital inclusion in all the different languages of India.”

The government’s Digital India expansion plans also look at modernizing the National Knowledge Network (NKN), which connects 1,787 educational institutions. In addition, it focuses on the importance of cyber security by increasing cyber awareness courses for, among other things, 12 million university students.

Currently, Bhashini aims to create a “unifying architecture” to build a community of participants working with a “unified approach”. While the platform offers translation services, it also allows individuals to submit local language data points to improve the service.