The Union government has developed an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered language platform seeking to include tribal communities in the country’s digital transformation by getting hundreds of tribal languages online and providing benefits to people in their own languages.
AdiVaani, developed under the ministry of tribal affairs in collaboration with IIT Delhi, enables translation and transcription between Hindi, English and tribal languages through text and speech. The platform currently supports Santali, Mundari, Bhili and Gondi, with Kui and Garo among the languages being taken up next. The project’s maker-checker-superchecker process is intended to identify subtle errors that automated systems can introduce, including incorrect suffixes, unnatural expressions and the loss of oral registers.
Its next phase envisages adding 10 more languages and significantly expanding verified speech recordings, with collections expected to run into hundreds of thousands of samples for individual languages.
Native speakers, translators, linguists and community elders are involved in building and checking the language datasets, according to people familiar with the matter.
