Artificial Intelligence can help India overcome language divide: Expert

BENGALURU: Artificial intelligence (AI) can help India overcome language divide and enable anyone to understand any language, said Prof Raj Reddy, one of the early pioneers of AI.

He was talking at the Responsible AI for Social Empowerment Summit.

Prof Reddy said today advancements of AI can enable anyone to speak and understand any language using speech to speech technology.


"The same technology can be used to overcome India’s language divide," he said adding that this would require 100000 hours of speech and 100 million words of text for each language.

Explaining the problems that can be solved using AI today, Prof Reddy said using spoken language assistant people at the bottom, who cannot read, would be able to shop, pay bills and bank online.

"All we need to do is anchorage industry to develop Indian language Alexas," he said.

India would need certain necessary infrastructure to 'fully realign these aspirations'.

While each household will need a fibre connection with unlimited capacity instead of the current restricted wireless option; the population needs to be trained in digital literacy, said Prof Reddy.

Finally, according to the AI expert, the government, industry and academia should work together for the necessary indian language datasets, translation systems and dialogue applications.

Prof Reddy said AI can do things such as enabling countries to eliminate lockdown, replace one-size fits all education with personalised education based on individual student capabilities and interest.