Youth Incorporated Magazine

We all have heard it from many people that AI is the next big thing in the space of technology, but have you wondered why? It is because it is making the impossible possible. It has the potential to replace humans with robots. In times when the entire world has gone digital, experts are now developing solutions to essential problems people are facing in every important aspect of life. An example of this would be the recent development of AI models by the faculty of IIT Madras, a public technical and research university located in Chennai, the best in the country. 

Artificial Intelligence simply refers to machines having the ‘intelligence’ or capabilities to perform human functions. This is why AI is said to be the next big thing, the positive effects have already begun to show. It has the potential to improve the healthcare, business, banking and education sectors among others. Not just this, it also holds the ability to help government manage, store and process important data or national and international importance. 

Keeping this is mind, IIT Madras (Indian Institute of Technology in Madras), has developed AI models and datasets to generate texts in 11 Indian Regional Languages, in collaboration with ‘AI4Bharat’, a platform that builds solutions to problems which are of relevance to India. These Indian languages include Tamil, Hindi, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Punjabi, Bengali, Odia, Assamese, Gujarati, and Marathi. 

The main purpose of developing these models was to help people carry out their digital tasks with easy understanding without facing any language barriers. These multilingual models will cater to the needs of faculty, students, startups and industries. The AI models and datasets built by the faculty of IIT Madras can be assessed by anyone and everyone that too free of cost. It is readily available on Github repository (https://indicnlp.ai4bharat.org/) and can be downloaded too. 

Now that education in India has shifted online, students across India are especially going to benefit from this as now they can raise doubts and understand everything taught to them in the language they are most comfortable with. Throwing light of this, Dr. Mitesh M. Khapra, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Madras, commented, “We have a very rich diversity of languages in our country. As we move towards a digital economy, it is important that our languages find a space online. This requires a lot of innovation in creating input tools, datasets, and AI models for Indian languages.” 

“While such tools are available for English and other foreign languages, there are hardly any tools for Indian languages and this is the critical gap that we are trying to address through this initiative. These models are available free of cost as we want the entire country to benefit from them,” Dr. Mitesh Khapra further added. 

The researchers at AI4Bharat and the faculty of IIT Madras took around one year to develop these models which is now made available for all across the country. 

*Information source: BW Education, Hindustan Times