I’ve been using the Government of India’s Bhashini ("Bhasha Interface for India") app for a few days now, and it’s an impressive initiative ongoing for some time now. It brings together recent advances in AI with deep local knowledge to support India’s linguistic diversity on a single platform.
At its core, Bhashini is an app and website that offers AI-based translation across about 30 Indian languages. It supports text-to-text translation, text-to-speech and speech-to-text, real-time conversational translation (speech to speech), and on the app, photo-to-text translation as well. The system is built on NLP and large language models trained specifically for Indian languages.
Screenshot of the Bhashini app, with the real time converse translation option.
A feature I found particularly interesting is that when you choose a language pair, the app shows the underlying AI models available for that pair. For example, for English–Hindi translation across modes, it lists multiple models such as Bhashini Sarvam Translate 1, Bhashini IIIT Hyderabad, Bhashini AI4Bharat V3, among others.
Another standout aspect is “Bhasha Daan,” which allows users to contribute text and speech data to help improve the models. It’s a thoughtful way of combining the everyday knowledge of common speakers with the expertise of linguists and researchers.
What’s especially encouraging is the clear push toward India-specific, India-centric AI solutions. In today’s geopolitical climate, building self-reliance and retaining control over our data is not just desirable but necessary.
The app is available on both the Play Store and iOS, and the web version is accessible via Anuvaad.
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