Government Is Investing In 100 AI-Based Startups For New Regional Language Translation Services

Ministry of Electronics And Information Technology or MeitY has decided to invest in 100 AI-based language translation startups that offer translation services for regional languages in the country.

The platform will later allow private conglomerates or startups for providing services in local languages to their users. With the help of AI and machine learning, as more people will join the platform, the system will improve and provide better results.

The project is called the Natural Languages Translation Mission. As a part of this project, MeitY will ask these startups to translate parliament and election commission records that are existent in an array of 22 regional languages to form as its primary database.

A senior official related to this matter told ET, "We expect the industry to take it further and the government will fund 100 startups directly with seed money to build on this technology and use it. The government will also use the platform for furthering its own initiatives like translating videos of technical education lectures in local languages."

The official also stated while tech giants like Google currently offer translation services, they're not accurate all the time. He stated, "Those services are accurate if you use them for small sentences, but the accuracy goes down for longer sentences and where domain knowledge issues such as legal issues are involved."

Representative Image: Pixabay

While primarily the focus is on languages like Hindi, Marathi and Gujarati, more languages will soon be added to the list. Moreover, in the beginning, even though the project focusses on text to text translation, the future goal is seamless speech to speech translation.

MeitY is in conversation with the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, the International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing in Pune and the Indian Institute of Science for turning this project a success.

These institutions will collaborate to work on the platform and create centres of excellence and engineering, while also approaching the industry for further collaborations.