In a move to increase adoption of Bhashini, the natural language processing service, the government has sought bids from higher education institutes and standalone start-up incubators, as per a report by the Economic Times.
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), in its request-for-empanelment tender, has stated that the higher education institutes and incubators applying for the programme should work towards enhancing and increasing the adoption of the Bhashini platform across all Indian languages and geographies.
The IT ministry has asked the bids to be submitted by July 10.
It further stressed that higher education institutes must also “dedicate research efforts to improve the capabilities of the BHASHINI platform for under-resourced Indian languages with the limited digital presence” and explore collaborations with linguistic communities for data collection and annotation.
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Bhashini, earlier known as the National Language Translation Mission, helps in facilitating real-time translation of local Indian languages through open-source databases and translation tools. It was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the inauguration of the Digital India Week at Gandhinagar, Gujarat in 2022.
An AI-driven language translation system, it helps in breaking down language barriers and enabling conversations between speakers of different Indian languages. It is available on Android and iOS, providing a user-friendly experience.
The tender emphasised that bidders must conduct research projects which not only improves the accuracy and fluency of machine translation for specific language pairs but also work on domain-specific language models for government, education, healthcare, and other critical sectors.
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It further added that it should also focus on developing and participating in multilingual benchmarking initiatives to assess the progress of machine translation models for Indian languages, the report further added.
India being a linguistically diverse country, the barriers and challenges arising out of languages can be overcomed by Bhashini.
Talking to Business Standard during Global Fintech Fest in October, Amitabh Nag, CEO of the Digital India Bhashini Division (DIBD) stated that Bhashini had the potential to help promote financial inclusivity and economic empowerment and enhance financial literacy.
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