Bhashini

‘Digital India BHASHINI’ seeks to enable easy access to the internet and digital services in Indian languages, including voice-based access, and help the creation of content in Indian languages. It was launched during August 2022 at Gandhinagar, Gujarat. Bashini stands for Bhasha Interface for India.

Vision

Harness natural language technologies to enable a diverse ecosystem of contributors, partnering entities and citizens for the purpose of transcending language barriers, thereby ensuring digital inclusion and digital empowerment in an Aatma Nirbhar Bharat

Aim

• To empower Indian citizens by connecting them to the Digital Initiatives of   the country in their own language, thereby leading to digital inclusion.
• To catalyze the entire Digital Ecosystem and is a giant step towards realizing the goal of Digital Government. 
• To build a National Public Digital Platform for languages to develop services and products for citizens by leveraging the power of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.
• To increase the content in Indian languages on the Internet substantially in the domains of public interest, particularly, governance and-policy, science & technology, etc., thus encouraging citizens to use the Internet in their own language. 

Salient Features

• BHASHINI shall act as an orchestrator to unify and align a large diverse network across government, industry, academia, research groups and start-ups to bring all their contributions into an open repository.
• BHASHINI will involve the development of a national digital public platform for language to provide universal access to content i.e. boost the delivery of digital content in all Indian languages. This would result in the creation of a knowledge-based society where information is freely and readily available and would make the ecosystem and citizens “Atmanirbhar.”
• Citizens shall be provided easy tools and motivated to contribute towards the languages of their liking through BHASHINI’s crowd-sourcing platform. They will be the prime beneficiaries of this whole initiative.
• Startups will also be encouraged to create innovative applications by using Bhashini’s resources. 

Road Map for BHASHINI

Bhashini’s journey has been designed to consist of key milestones segregated across four tracks. They are as follows.

• Foundation Track
  • Publish Universal Language Contribution API
  • Data repository
  • Model repository 
  • Benchmarking system
  • Data collection tools 
• Contribution Track
  • Training and benchmark datasets
  • Data contributions from  government entities, language chapters, communities etc
  • Crowd sourcing initiatives
  • Open source language models 
• Innovation Track
  • Hackathons and challenge rounds for developing applications
  • Inter-ministerial projects that leverage Bhashini to provide citizen centric services 
• Grand Challenge Track
  • One grand challenge related to Bhashini's goals every year
  • Participation from academia and industry 

BHASHA DAAN

Bhasha Daan is an initiative to crowdsource language inputs for multiple Indian languages as part of Project BHASHINI. It calls upon citizens to help build an open repository of data to digitally enrich his/her own language. The aim here is to create large datasets for Indian languages, which can be used to train AI models for use by different stakeholders to create products or services for the betterment of society. One can contribute to the project anonymously. The bigger aim is to create an open-source repository that anyone can access. 

Categories of Bhasha Daan

• Suno India - One can enrich one’s language by typing the audio he/she hears, or by validating the text transcribed by others. 
• Bolo India - One can enrich one’s language by donating the voice, through recording of sentences. One can also validate the audios recorded by others 
• Likho India - One can contribute by translating the prompted text. One can also validate the translations contributed by others. 
• Dekho India - One can enrich one’s language by typing the text seen, or by labelling the image. One can also validate the images contributed by others

Bhashini app

Bhashini App is available to citizens to translate content in their native language. The App allows users to converse through 3 key features—TEXT, VOICE, and CONVERSE. The TEXT feature supports translation into 22 Indian languages, while the CONVERSE and SPEAK features each cover 13 languages, contributing to enhanced linguistic accessibility and understanding. 

Using this application users can:

• Convert their voice to text.
• Translate from one Indian language to another.
• Generate voice from text.
• Communicate with others who do not know your language.

To download the App for Android users, click here.

To download the App for iOS users, click here.

Source : Bhashini