Mumbai, India: The Digital India BHASHINI Division has held a workshop at Maharashtra Mantralaya to explore how multilingual and voice-enabled artificial intelligence can improve access to government services and digital information in Marathi and other Indian languages.
The workshop was organised by the Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD), under the Digital India Corporation and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, in collaboration with Maharashtra’s Language Department. Discussions focused on making digital governance more accessible by enabling systems to understand, process and communicate in languages commonly used by citizens.
The BHASHINI team demonstrated several language AI capabilities, including speech recognition, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, translation and voice-enabled interaction. The demonstrations showed how such technologies could be integrated into public services to make interactions between citizens and digital platforms more natural and inclusive.
A major focus was the need for high-quality and representative language data to develop AI systems suited to local requirements. The workshop discussed greater involvement of language experts, government institutions, academia and communities in building datasets for Marathi and other Indian languages.
The discussions also highlighted BhashaDaan, BHASHINI’s crowdsourcing initiative, which enables citizens to contribute language data and strengthen language resources.
Another area explored was department-specific Language AI that can incorporate specialised terminology used by different government departments. Such systems could improve the processing of government content and support multilingual communication across public services.
The workshop also examined the proposed MahaBHASHINI concept, aimed at supporting multilingual digital experiences across public-facing areas such as tourism and transport. Officials and stakeholders discussed potential priority use cases and areas of collaboration between Maharashtra’s government and BHASHINI.
BHASHINI currently supports 36 Indian text languages, 23 Indian voice languages and 35 international languages. Its technology powers more than 800 government websites, with over 9 billion cumulative AI inferences and more than 24 million AI inferences processed daily, according to the ministry.
Source: This article is based on an official press release issued by the Press Information Bureau (PIB)
Press Release: Press Information Bureau
