While speaking to the audience at the Kashi Tamil Sangamam in Varanasi last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged the Tamil-speaking audience present at the venue to use their headphones. While Modi addressed the crowd in Hindi, AI translated the speech in real-time in Tamil for his regional listeners present at the programme.
This gave us a peek into what AI-powered translation models can achieve in breaking language barriers and facilitating seamless communication across diverse linguistic audiences. The possibilities are aplenty.
With the majority of online content in English and only around 10% of the population proficient in the language, numerous individuals in rural India face challenges accessing information on the web.
“If you look at ChatGPT or Bard, they are all trained on the internet, where almost 80 to 90% of the data is in English and Western-oriented. It neither has vernacular data nor an Indian context,” Jaspreet Bindra, founder of Tech Whisperer Ltd, told AIM.
Last year, the Supreme Court of India also introduced an AI-powered translation tool which translates judicial proceedings into eleven vernacular languages. In India, the endeavour has been to provide citizens with access to information in their native language.
Hence, India is banking on the ability of AI to bridge the language barrier in the country. The aim is not just to make the web accessible but to provide numerous government policies and services accessible to the unlettered- individuals who may not possess writing skills but can communicate solely through their native language.
Now, the recent developments in the AI space is making this possible.
Conversations with AI
Pramod Verma, chief technology officer at EkStep Foundation and former chief architect at Aadhaar and India Stack, believes AI has the potential to be of great service to the underserved. He thinks the ability to converse with AI is going to be revolutionary.
While speaking at the keynote address at the AWS Public Sector Symposium in New Delhi last year, he said, “Imagine just telling the app ‘pay my electricity bill’ in your native language, and the AI takes care of the rest.” What Verma imagines could be a reality very soon, given the rapid advancements in AI.
Last year, the RBI announced its plans on adding AI-powered conversational payments for the UPI. Not just payments, AI-powered conversational tools can also be used to access government policies and services. For example, farmers can now converse with PM Kisan Chatbot in their native languages. This is being enabled by Bhashini’s AI-powered translation tools.
Bhashini, a government initiative, was announced by Modi in 2022 as a means to break the language barrier in the country. In addition to Bhashini, Sarvam AI, a generative AI startup that recently secured funding of USD 41 million to develop Indic LLMs, is also creating similar conversational AI tools and models.
“One of the core things we believe in is that people will want to obtain various kinds of information and services through conversations. I think the recent developments in generative and voice makes this possible at a large scale at this time,” Vivek Raghavan, who previously served as the chief project manager and biometric architect at Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) and the co-founder of Sarvam AI, told AIM.
Challenges remain
However, using AI-powered conversational tools also poses certain risks, especially in payments. For example, by introducing AI-powered conversational payments to UPI, the apex bank wants to make the technology more accessible, especially in rural areas. While, without a doubt, the integration will enhance financial inclusion and herald a transformative era for digital payments in India, it also raises security concerns.
“This innovation not only streamlines the user experience, making transactions more convenient and accessible, especially in rural areas but also presents new challenges in terms of security,” Aditya Gupta, founder and CEO at Credilio, told AIM.
The voice-activated system raises potential security issues such as voice authentication vulnerabilities and misuse, necessitating rigorous measures to ensure the trustworthiness of AI-powered voice payments.
“Striking the right balance between accessibility and security is crucial for realising the full potential of this technology in reshaping India’s digital payments landscape”, Gupta added.
India speaks hundreds of languages
For this to be impactful at a population scale, more and more languages need to be added. For instance, during the first phase, the PM Kisan Chatbot was available in five Indic languages — English, Hindi, Tamil, Bangla, and Odia.
While the plan is to cover the 22 official languages of India, the country is linguistically diverse, with over 100 different languages and thousands of dialects.
Making the technology available in numerous languages poses a significant challenge due to the absence of pre-existing datasets for training models in these languages. Gathering data for diverse languages is a labour-intensive task in itself.
