India’s AI System Bhashini is Gaining Ground

India’s AI-powered language translation system Bhashini is beginning to see rapid adoption, with around 7 million inferences per day since its launch in June 2023, according to the company’s CEO.

The system, which enables people to communicate across India’s many languages, has developed over 300 open-source AI models aimed at bridging the country’s linguistic and digital divides.

In a conversation with Bank of America, Bhashini’s CEO outlined several high-profile use cases for the technology, including facilitating peer-to-peer money transfers via voice commands on feature phones using India’s Unified Payments Interface, and a collaboration with the Open Network for Digital Commerce to potentially boost e-commerce penetration to 20% in India.

The system is also being deployed to handle citizen grievances submitted to the Prime Minister’s office. The development of Bhashini faced significant challenges due to the lack of digitized data across India’s diverse languages, its top executive told Bank of America.

To overcome this, the company launched a mobile app and hired hundreds of translators to create datasets, while also crowdsourcing language contributions through an initiative called “Bhashadaan” or language donation.

As Bhashini scales up, it is exploring enterprise applications, with discussions underway with various banks to develop tailored solutions.