Noida, Sep 10 (APAC Media): The Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD) on Thursday organised a workshop at Maharashtra Mantralaya to explore the use of multilingual and voice-enabled artificial intelligence (AI) to improve access to digital services in Marathi and other Indian languages.
The workshop, organised in collaboration with the Language Department of the Maharashtra government, focused on the potential of Language AI to make government information and citizen-facing digital services more inclusive and accessible.
The BHASHINI team demonstrated speech recognition, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, translation and voice-enabled interaction technologies during the workshop.
The demonstrations illustrated the integration of these technologies into public services, allowing citizens to engage with digital systems in their preferred languages.
“Language should be an enabler of access to digital public services. Multilingual and voice-enabled AI can help make digital governance more accessible to citizens in the languages they use in their daily lives,” the discussions highlighted.
Participants also stressed the need for high-quality and representative language datasets to develop AI systems suited to local requirements.
The workshop discussed greater participation by language experts, government departments, academia and communities in developing language datasets for Marathi and other Indian languages.
The participants also highlighted the role of BhashaDaan, BHASHINI’s crowdsourcing initiative, which enables citizens to contribute language data for strengthening language resources.
Another key area of discussion was the development of department-specific language AI that incorporates specialised government terminology.
“Specialised language models can improve the understanding and processing of government content while enabling more effective multilingual communication across public services,” the discussions noted.
The workshop also explored the proposed MahaBHASHINI concept for creating a Maharashtra-focused multilingual AI ecosystem covering sectors such as tourism, transport and other citizen-facing services.
The engagement provided an opportunity for officials and stakeholders to identify priority use cases and areas of collaboration between the Maharashtra government and BHASHINI.
Government officials, language experts and other stakeholders participated in discussions on language technology, datasets, research and applications of language AI.
The workshop marks another step towards Centre-State collaboration for building an inclusive multilingual digital ecosystem, where language can facilitate access, participation and digital empowerment.
The Digital India BHASHINI Division, under the Digital India Corporation and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, is developing a national ecosystem for AI-powered multilingual digital inclusion.
According to the division, BHASHINI supports 36 Indian text languages, 23 Indian voice languages and 35 international languages. It powers more than 800 government websites and has enabled over 9 billion cumulative AI inferences, while processing well over 24 million AI inferences daily.
The National Hub for Language Technology (NHLT) is among the largest inference platforms in the Global South and supports the adoption of language AI across government and public-facing digital services.
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