IIT Madras and Nandan Nilekani launches an AI centre on Indian Languages

Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) is launching the 'Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat' to advance Indian language technology with an aim to create a social impact. Rohini and Nandan Nilekani are supporting this centre with a generous grant of INR 36 crore through Nilekani Philanthropies. 

IIT Madras set up AI4Bharat as an initiative to build open-source language AI for Indian languages. For the past two years, the team led by Dr Mitesh Khapra, Dr Pratyush Kumar and Dr Anoop Kunchukuttan has contributed to Indian language technology, including state-of-the-art Machine Translation and Speech Recognition models.

Commenting on the launch of this centre, Nilekani said, "The Digital India Bhashini mission has been launched with the goal of all services and information being available to citizens in their language with 'collaborative AI' at the design core. AI4Bharat will continue to contribute and accelerate the Indic language AI work as a public good and is fully aligned with the goals of the Bhashini mission."

Elaborating on the Centre, Dr Mitesh M. Khapra, associate professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Madras, said, "Given the rich diversity of languages in India coupled with a rapidly expanding digital world, it is important to make significant advances in language technology to benefit the commoner. While technology has significantly improved for English and other languages, Indian languages lag. The centre will focus on bridging this gap."

The centre has open-sourced advanced resources; these models are freely available and can be downloaded from their webpage. 

Speaking about the development at the centre, Dr Anoop Kunchukuttan, a researcher at Microsoft, said, "Building AI technologies for the diverse set of Indian languages is expensive, given the need for large datasets and computing power. We are grateful that several organisations have supported the efforts to build open-source AI."