Teaching AI to speak India
Artificial intelligence can chat, translate and answer questions but only if it understands your language. At IIT Madras, researchers at AI4Bharat are travelling across India, collecting voices, preserving dialects and teaching AI to understand the country’s incredible linguistic diversity.
AI research lab AI4Bharat at IIT Madras is working on teaching artificial intelligence to understand and speak India's many languages. This is no simple task, as most AI systems have learned from large amounts of digital data, mostly in English. However, India has a vast linguistic diversity, with languages and accents changing every few hundred kilometers.
Some communities have spoken words without standard written forms. To tackle this challenge, researchers have taken a unique approach. They collect speech data from people across the country, speaking over 500 different districts. Instead of reading sentences, participants talk about their lives, celebrating traditions, preparing dishes, talking about weddings, and sharing village stories.
This human-led approach helps AI understand the richness and diversity of India's spoken language. Researchers gather thousands, often millions, of speech-and-text pairs for AI models to learn from. These recordings become the training material, helping AI recognize patterns and understand meaning. Transcribing the audio into text creates a living archive of how India speaks, conversation by conversation.
Despite the challenges, the process is rewarding, offering insights into the many ways people across India communicate.
Written by urgent.news from The Hindu - Sci-Tech's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
