Hello Readers,
INDIA is home to more than a billion people who speak hundreds of different languages and dialects, although only 22 languages are recognized constitutionally. Almost 75% of the population can read, write, and speak in their native language, and a significant percentage prefer voice-based interactions. These communication barriers present challenges for many in accessing online services, including those services and schemes offered by the Indian government for the masses.
Cognizant of this, the Indian government announced the NATIONAL LANGUAGE TRANSLATION MISSION, in the Union Budget 2021-22 and aims to develop next-generation, voice-based government apps, and websites that will be operable in all Indian languages. The mission will build on existing projects in the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) which has been working on various applications like text-to-speech, text-to-text, etc. This move has strongly underlined the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to solve many challenging problems and creates great scope for cognitive AI, speech recognition, and language translation services in a multilingual market like India.
Need for a public digital Infrastructure for Indian languages:
“The ability to communicate with anyone in any language — that’s a superpower people have dreamed of forever,”
Even if we only consider the official languages as declared by the Indian constitution, we have 22 languages, each of them being spoken by over ten lakh people. Over the last decade, the enormous penetration of the Internet in the country means that a major chunk of this multilingual population is actively seeking to consume and interact with online content in their own languages.
- Paucity of Indian language content
India has over 75 crore people using the internet, not particularly in English, but in their own languages as well. Indian users use the internet across low friction verticals such as entertainment, news, messaging, and social media. However, the Internet today is severely deficient in terms of content for Indian languages. In fact, 53% of non-Internet owners in India state that they would start using the Internet if it has content available in their local languages.
- Unavailability of resources in native language
Much of the information (and therefore access to internet, e-governance, ecommerce, e-banking etc.) cannot be used by the majority of the population as it is available majorly in English. Unfamiliarity with English means that Indian language users hesitate using these services, as they don’t completely understand what is being offered to them.
Therefore, in India’s new and emerging digital ecosystems of the future, we must find novel ways to engage with citizens who communicate in varied languages and dialects. The objective is to make information available to the people in their native language in order to be a “truly” connected nation.
National Language Translation Mission
Vision:
To harness Natural Language Technologies to overcome the language barrier through the
use of a public Digital Platform achieving the goal of ‘One India’ in the digital landscape and contributor towards ‘AatmaNirbhar Bharat’
Mission:
To create a knowledge-based society by transcending the language barriers and providing the wealth of information available in the internet across all scheduled languages of India, both in the form of speech and text
Many such national public digital platforms viz. Aadhaar, UPI, GeM, GSTN, NDHM etc. are built using digital technologies including Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Analytics and Automation. These platforms are built using open data, open-source code and open APIs to encourage open and secure ecosystems, plus allowing the private sector and start-ups to innovate and bring value-added services to the citizens.
A similar approach has been adopted by the National Language Translation Mission (NLTM) which aims to build Speech to Speech Machine Translation and evolve a Unified Language Interface (ULI) for translation of Indian Languages in the next 3 years to bring together multiple efforts towards Indic Language Technologies.
The current approach aims to provide a free and open-source National Public Digital Platform to encourage open ecosystems, allow private sector innovation to provide improved services and products in the domain of language technologies, in order to enable citizens to access digital services including educational content in their native language to further increase digital inclusion and accessibility. The equal participation of State Governments and other central ministries in the implementation of Language/State Missions is the key to strengthen the partnership based model to develop the platform and the platform acting as an orchestrator to bring together language technologies stakeholders for the aims of the mission.
Call for research Proposals under NLTM was conducted by MeitY from Academia and research groups, who shall be responsible for carrying out research in the areas of language technologies and translation, covering a set of languages out of the current 22 scheduled languages.
Language services in India:
- Language services have been around for a while, and we experience some of them in everyday life. Translator apps like Google Translate use end-to-end Deep Neural Network (DNN) models to provide a translation in over 90 languages and dialects.
- Then there’s Cortana, Alexa, and Siri – all of which are based on speech recognition technology enabling speech-based services deployment across many industries.
- In India, some of the leading telecom operators and e-commerce players have introduced the “voice search” option on their apps, which users can avail in English or Hindi.
- Meanwhile, some banks have deployed AI-powered multilingual voice bots, which can support Indian language dialects.
- India’s local language needs are fuelling the demand for, and innovation in, language services and enabling them to play a big role in unlocking India’s future growth.
Disclaimer: This Article is only a knowledge sharing initiative and is based on the Relevant Provisions as applicable and as per the information existing at the time of the preparation. In no event RMPS & Co. or the Author or any other persons be liable for any direct and indirect result from this Article or any inadvertent omission of the provisions, update etc if any.
Published on: February 10, 2023