AI-powered 'Adi Vaani' bridging digital divide for tribal communities
New Delhi, Nov 15
Adi Vaani, an AI-powered translation and language platform, aims to bridge the digital divide for tribal communities. Starting with Santali, Bhili, Mundari and Gondi, Adi Vaani has expanded to offer text translation in nine tribal languages, a government factsheet said on Sunday.
Launched by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs on September 1, 2025, it was developed by a national consortium led by IIT Delhi, along with BITS Pilani, IIIT Hyderabad, IIIT Nava Raipur and the Tribal Research Institutes (TRIs) of Jharkhand, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Meghalaya.
Over time, several other state Tribal Research Institutes (TRIs) also joined the initiative, further expanding its collaborative reach across the country.
It also provides speech translation, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), video subtitling, and access to more than 300 language primers. Primers are basic language learning resources designed to help new learners understand and practice tribal languages easily.
The platform has recorded over 35,000 Android downloads and around 6,500 monthly users, indicating its growing digital reach, said the factsheet.
"What makes Adi Vaani different is its community-based approach. Native speakers contribute words, sentences, and voice recordings through TRIs and AdiKosh. These are checked by language experts before being used to train AI models. The project aims to collect around 1,00,000 sentence pairs and 100 hours of speech recordings per language," said the factsheet.
As on October 15, 2026, State TRIs contributed approximately 13.9 lakh text sentences across ten languages and around 300 hours of speech data.
This approach combines modern technology with community knowledge to support the preservation, learning and everyday use of tribal languages. Each language passes through five phases, from data collection to integration on the platform, and the models are retrained as the community contributes more data.
According to Census 2011, India has about 10.45 crore Scheduled Tribe people, accounting for about 8.6 per cent of the country's population. Adi Vaani works with a total of 13 tribal languages across different regions of India.
— IANS
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