BHASHINI AI can support multilingual access in academic, research settings
New Delhi, Oct 25
Voice-first multilingual AI, speech-to-text, translation, optical character recognition and document translation can support multilingual access in academic and research settings, according to government officials.
BHASHINI's broader multilingual AI ecosystem brings together language datasets, AI models, APIs and applications to support a range of language technology use cases.
BHASHINI has recorded over 10 billion cumulative AI inferences and supports 36 Indian languages for text, 23 Indian languages for voice and 35 international languages.
Its website translation plugin enables multilingual access across more than 800 government websites, according to an official statement.
The Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD), under Digital India Corporation (DIC), MeitY, participated in the 29th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD-2026), held at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi from October 23-25.
Baishali Chakraborty, speaking on behalf of DIBD, conducted a session on BHASHINI's multilingual artificial intelligence capabilities and their potential to make scholarly knowledge more accessible across languages.
The session highlighted how BHASHINI's Language-First Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) can support higher education institutions, libraries and research repositories in addressing language barriers and expanding access to academic content.
A live demonstration of Shrutlekh showcased real-time speech transcription with simultaneous translation, illustrating its potential applications in lecture halls, research seminars, conferences and academic discussions.
A key focus of the session was the potential to extend AI-powered translation to electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), including lengthy and specialised academic documents. BHASHINI Pragati, a document translation workbench developed for the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG), was presented as an example of structured document translation and review.
The workbench supports the processing of large documents, including those spanning 100 to 500 pages, with quality checks and data security considerations, said the statement.
Harshad Sharma, Senior Manager (Finance), Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD), said that "Making research and scholarly knowledge accessible across Indian languages is an important step towards a more inclusive knowledge ecosystem".
"BHASHINI's multilingual AI capabilities, including document translation and speech technologies, can help universities, libraries and research repositories reach wider audiences. Engagement with academic institutions will be key to understanding their requirements and developing reliable solutions for multilingual access to theses, dissertations and other research content," Sharma noted.
— IANS
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