Google DeepMind Launches AI Project for 125 Indian Languages

August 30, 2024

Google DeepMind’s India unit is leading a big AI project called “Morni.” This project is focused on developing AI technologies that can understand and work with 125 different Indian languages and dialects. This is very important because India is a country with many languages, and making AI work for all of them will help ensure that everyone can benefit from AI, no matter what language they speak.

Why is the Morni Project Important?

India officially recognizes 22 languages, but the Morni project is aiming much higher by trying to include over 100 languages. This is because many people in India speak languages that are not officially recognized but are still widely used. For example, 60 of these languages are spoken by more than a billion people in total. This shows that there is a huge number of people who are not fully represented in current AI technologies.

Challenges in Language Data

One big challenge that Manish Gupta, the Director of Google DeepMind, has pointed out is the lack of digital data for many Indian languages. For 73 out of the 125 languages targeted by the project, there is no digital data available at all. This makes it very hard to develop AI that can understand and work with these languages. Even Hindi, which is widely spoken, makes up only 0.1% of all the text available on the internet.

How is Google Addressing These Challenges?

To solve the problem of not having enough language data, Google started Project Vaani in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and ARTPARK. The goal of this project is to create a large, open-source database of speech data from different Indian languages. This data will help the Morni project build AI that can understand and respond in these languages.

Progress and Future Goals

So far, Project Vaani has completed its first phase, where it collected over 14,000 hours of speech data from 58 languages. This involved 80,000 people from 80 different districts across India. The ultimate goal is to collect 154,000 hours of speech data from all 773 districts in the country. The project is currently in its second phase, where it is focusing on covering all states by collecting data from 160 districts.

What is Google DeepMind?

Google DeepMind, founded in 2010, is a leading AI research company. It became famous in 2016 when its AI program, AlphaGo, beat a world champion in the game of Go. The team also developed AlphaFold, which solved the problem of protein folding, a key issue in biology. DeepMind’s AI has been used in healthcare, where it can predict when a patient’s health might get worse and help diagnose eye diseases. The company also created AI that reduced energy use in Google’s data centers by 40%. DeepMind is committed to making AI that is safe, fair, and ethical. Their work has greatly impacted gaming and the management of complex algorithms.

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