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27/12/22 06:07 AM IST

Project Vaani scales decibels as it maps language landscape of India

In News
  • The Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc), ARTPARK (AI and Robotics Technology Park) and Google have come together for an unusual digital project – mapping the language diversity of India by collecting speech sets of about a million people across 773 districts over three years.
About the project
  • Under Project Vaani, diverse languages used across India will be mapped by collecting speech sets of around 1 million people from 773 districts over 3 years.
  • The estimated cost of this project is around 30 to 40 million USD.
  • It is part of the Bengaluru-based IISc and Artpark’s Bhasha AI project that includes RESPIN (Recognizing Speech in Indian languages) and SYSPIN (Synthesizing Speech in Indian languages).
  • The project would involve IISc and Google recording around 1.5 lakh hours of speech, part of which will be transcribed in local scripts.
  • This project uses a district-anchored approach, which involves recording local speeches by randomly selecting over 1,000 people from each district.
Objective
  • The goal of the project is to boost the development of technologies such as automatic speech recognition, speech to speech translation and natural language understanding. Given that in India the dialect changes in literally every district, the project takes a district level approach.
  • The greater objective is to create a technological solution that will eliminate the linguistic barriers that currently exist in technology and increase accessibility for a wider range of people.
  • Language AI is fundamentally important, as much of what is available on the internet is in English. “To build a more comprehensive lexicon, we’re attempting to capture more diversity and natural speech.
  • The new model proposed under the Vaani project supports both speech and text translation. This would be a leap from the Multilingual Representations for Indian Languages (MuRIL), which only supports text-based translation.
Source- Live Mint

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