Google and Microsoft bet on 27-year-old Stanford alum to make AI work for a billion users

Karya differentiates itself from other data vendors by offering its contractors – mostly women, and mostly in rural communities – as much as 20 times the prevailing minimum wage, with the promise of producing better quality Indian-language data that tech companies will pay more to obtain. — Unsplash

In her one-room home on a quiet street in Agara, a tiny village three hours southwest of Bangalore that’s fringed by rice paddies and groundnut fields, Preethi P. sits on a stool near a sewing machine. Normally, she would spend hours mending or stitching clothes, averaging less than US$1 (RM4.70) a day for her work.

On this day, however, she is reading a sentence in her native Kannada language into an app on a phone. She pauses briefly, then reads another.