DBT Bureau
Bengaluru, 30 August 2024
Google DeepMind’s India unit is currently working on an Indic language artificial intelligence (AI) project named- ‘Morni’, which will develop an Indic AI covering 125 Indian languages and dialects, the Economic Times in a report said.
“So India has 22 scheduled languages, which are viewed as official languages. But in our work, we are targeting over 100 Indian languages, because we find that there are 60 Indian languages which have over a billion speakers and over 125 languages that have over a lakh speakers each,” said the report quoting Manish Gupta, Director of Google DeepMind, Google India who addressed the Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai on Thursday (29 August).
According to the report, 73 of these 125 languages had zero corpus of digital data available. Even for a language like Hindi, which is now spoken by close to 10% of the world’s population, the share of text on the internet is 0.1%, the report said quoting Gupta of Google DeepMind’s India unit head.
The report noted that Google’s research lab overcame the challenge of sourcing data for these languages by launching a project, Vaani, which is a collaboration among Google, Indian Institute of Science and ARTPARK (Artificial Intelligence & Robotics Technology Park).
Google is also building a digital agri-stack that will facilitate loan to farmers, credit, reasonably priced crop insurance and enable various subsidy programmes that are run by the government in a non-data driven manner.
