The government contemplates investing a hundred startups to utilize its artificial intelligence (AI)-driven language platform which will provide translation services in many Indian languages. This will be made available for private use to allow big companies or startups to plug into it to provide services to their customers in local languages. As more users start using the platform, it will lead to the improvement of the system and better results. The ministry of electronics and IT (MeitY) has begun working on the program. It is thinking of providing Parliament and Election Commission records that are available in many Indian languages as input for the

database for the service.

A senior official said, “We expect the industry to take it further and the government will fund 100
startups directly with seed money to build on this technology and use it. The government will also use
the platform for furthering its own initiatives such as translating videos of technical education lectures in local languages.” He further added, “those services are accurate if you use them for small sentences, but the accuracy goes down for longer sentences and where domain knowledge issues such as legal issues are involved.”

The government is planning to build a large body of Indian language content to address this issue. Initially, the government will depend on text material available in both Hindi and English. Parliament documents and Election Commission notifications that are available in twenty-two languages will be used as input for the database. While it aims at providing speech to speech translation services, initially it will focus on text to text translation. At present, apart from Hindi, Marathi and Gujarati are the languages the government is focusing on before it offers services in other languages. It is planning to take assistance from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, the International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing in Pune, and the Indian Institute of Science for this project. They will help in building centers of excellence and engineering and will be approaching the industry to join up for the project.