Bhashini and Bhasha daan initiative

Subject : Science and Technology

Section :Computers

Concept :

Bhashini, a small team at the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY), is currently building a WhatsApp-based chatbot that relies on information generated by ChatGPTto return appropriate responses to queries.
And because people, especially farmers in rural areas, may not always want to type out their queries, questions can be asked on the chatbot through voice notes.
To build such a language model, the official said, it is pertinent to have large datasets of the various local languages spoken in India on which the model can be trained.
This is where an initiative called Bhasha Daancomes in. It is an ambitious project which aims to crowdsource voice datasets in multiple Indian languages.
On the project’s website, people can contribute in three key ways: by recording their voice samples in multiple Indian languages by reading out a piece of text, typing out a sentence being played, and translating text in one language into another.

Bhashini – National Language Translation Mission

‘Digital India BHASHINI’ seeks to enable easy access to the internet and digital services in Indian languages, including voice-based access, and help the creation of content in Indian languages.
It was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the inauguration of the Digital India Week, 2022 at Gandhinagar, Gujarat.
Bhashini stands for BHASaINterface for India
It is under the Ministry of Electronics & IT.
Digital India Bhashini, as India’s Artificial Intelligence (AI)-led language translation platform, will enable massive citizen engagement to build multilingual datasets through a crowd-sourcing initiative called Bhasha Daan.

Significance

This mission aims to empower Indian citizens by connecting them to the Digital Initiatives of the country in their own language, thereby leading to digital inclusion.
The Bhashini platform will catalyze the entire Digital Ecosystem and is a giant step towardsrealizing the goal of Digital Government.
Bhashini aims to build a National Public Digital Platform for languages to develop services and products for citizens by leveraging the power of artificial intelligence and other emergingtechnologies.
BHASHINI also aims to increase the content in Indian languages on the Internet substantially in the domains of public interest, particularly, governance and-policy, science & technology, etc., thus encouraging citizens to use the Internet in their own language.

Bhasha Daan

Bhasha Daan is an initiative to crowdsource language inputs for multiple Indian languages as part of Project BHASHINI.
It calls upon citizens to help build an open repository of data to digitally enrich his/her own language.
The aim here is to create large datasets for Indian languages, which can be used to train AI models for use by different stakeholders to create products or services for the following:
- Training and benchmark datasets
- Data contributions from government entities, language chapters, communities etc
- Crowd sourcing initiatives
- Open source language models

Categories of Bhasha Daan

Suno India: One can enrich one’s language by typing the audio he/she hears, or by validating the text transcribed by others.
Bolo India: One can enrich one’s language by donating the voice, through recording of sentences. One can also validate the audios recorded by others
LikhoIndia : One can contribute by translating the prompted text. One can also validate the translations contributed by others.
Dekho India: One can enrich one’s language by typing the text seen, or by labelling the image. One can also validate the images contributed by others.