India turns to AI to capture its 121 languages

India is building datasets in local languages to develop AI-based services and tools that non-English speakers struggle to access. — Image by teksomolika on Freepik

BENGALURU: For a few weeks this year, villagers in the southwestern Indian state of Karnataka read out dozens of sentences in their native Kannada language into an app as part of a project to build the country’s first AI-based chatbot for Tuberculosis.

There are more than 40 million native Kannada speakers in India, and it is one of the country’s 22 official languages and one of over 121 languages spoken by 10,000 people or more in the world’s most populous nation.