AdiVaani: Centre’s initiative takes tribal languages online

The Indian government has launched an AI-powered language platform called AdiVaani, aiming to digitally connect India's 700-plus tribal communities. This initiative, developed by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs in partnership with IIT Delhi, seeks to translate and transcribe tribal languages, including Santali, Mundari, Bhili, and Gondi, into Hindi and English, and vice versa.

The platform currently supports these four languages, with Kui and Garo to be added in the next phase. Its ultimate goal is to make government services, healthcare information, educational material, and other digital resources accessible in tribal languages. This involves text-to-text translation, automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech, and speech-to-speech functions.

Ranjana Chopra, secretary of the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, emphasized the importance of not allowing language to become a barrier to development. The project incorporates optical character recognition to digitize old textbooks, primers, dictionaries, and manuscripts in physical form.

The development process involves native speakers, translators, linguists, and community elders, following a maker-checker-superchecker approach to minimize errors in the language datasets. State Tribal Research Institutes in various states play a crucial role in identifying native speakers, documenting dialect variations, and verifying translations and transcriptions.

The broader objective of AdiVaani is to empower tribal communities by ensuring their languages and cultures remain integral to India's digital future. Chopra stressed that technology should strengthen the connection between communities and their languages and cultures, rather than replacing them. This initiative aims to make language the medium through which people think, speak, and understand the world, providing them with greater access to their linguistic and cultural knowledge.