AI4Bharat Advancing AI Technology for Indian Languages Through Open-Source Contributions

What is AI4Bharat?

AI4Bharat, a dedicated research lab operating from IIT Madras, focuses on pioneering advancements in Artificial Intelligence specifically tailored for Indian languages. Its core mission revolves around fostering open-source contributions to make AI technology accessible and relevant across India's diverse linguistic landscape. The lab actively develops and disseminates a variety of resources, including extensive datasets, innovative tools, and cutting-edge AI models.

The primary research areas encompass transliteration, natural language understanding, text generation, machine translation, automatic speech recognition (ASR), and text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. AI4Bharat's significant contributions, such as multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) and comprehensive translation systems covering all 22 scheduled Indian languages, have garnered global recognition. Its work impacts academia, industry, and government initiatives, driving technological progress for Indian language AI.

Features

Large Language Models: Development of multilingual LLMs (e.g., IndicBERT, IndicBART, Airavata) trained for Indian languages.
Machine Translation: Creation of models like IndicTransv2 for translation across all 22 scheduled Indian languages.
Transliteration: Building models (e.g., IndicXlit) for script conversion between Indian languages and English.
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR): Training models like IndicWav2Vec and IndicWhisper using extensive Indian language speech datasets.
Text to Speech (TTS): Developing natural-sounding synthetic voices for Indian languages (e.g., AI4BTTS).
Data Collection & Curation: Spearheading large-scale initiatives to build datasets for ASR, NMT, TTS, and LLMs in Indian languages.
Open-Source Focus: Releasing datasets, tools, and models under open-source licenses.

Use Cases

Developing multilingual applications targeting the Indian market.
Facilitating academic research in Indian language processing.
Enhancing digital accessibility with Indian language speech recognition and synthesis.
Building robust translation services between English and various Indian languages.
Powering chatbots and virtual assistants capable of understanding and responding in Indian languages.
Supporting government initiatives requiring Indian language technology.
Digitizing and processing documents written in diverse Indian scripts (future OCR focus).