News Excerpt:

At the Kashi-Tamil Sangamam event in Varanasi, the AI tool ‘Bhashini’ was used for the first time to live-translate Indian Prime Minister’s Hindi speech into Tamil. 

About Bhasini:

• It uses an AI-driven language transition tool.
• It allows translation and conversation in multiple Indian languages.
• It allows people to communicate in their native language to break language barriers. 
• It 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.
• The Union government has laid out four tracks defining Bhashini’s roadmap: Foundation, Contribution, Innovation, and Grand Challenge.
• The platform also has a separate ‘Bhasha Daan’ section, which enables individuals to contribute to various crowdsourcing initiatives.

Significance of Bhashini:

• It will enrich and develop Indian languages and make digital content in native languages easily accessible.
• Such an initiative assumes significance in India where over 19,500 languages or dialects are spoken as mother tongues, according to the 2011 census.
• It will bridge the language barrier and encourage developers to provide digital services in local languages. 
• The Union Finance minister Sitharaman had announced the National Language Translation Mission (NLTM) in the 2021-22 budget. 
• The initiative was introduced following a survey that found that 53 percent of Indians who do not use the Internet will access the web if the content is available in their native language.