Voice instructions in one’s native tongue for mobile phone recharging, FasTag, and gas bill payment may soon be possible!
At the CNBC TV18-Moneycontrol AI Alliance event held in Pune on March 27, CEO of Digital India Bhashini Division Amitabh Nag stated that the Indian government hopes to extend the use cases for its Bhashini initiative, an AI-led language translation system, to include paying gas bills, recharging mobile phones, and other similar tasks by the end of April of this year.
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and Bhashini worked together to introduce Hello! UPI, a voice-activated UPI payment functionality, last year.
“We are working on all of these use cases and will soon be introducing Mobile Recharge Kardo, FasTag Charge Kar Do, and Gas Bill Pay Kar Do. The models are being trained,” Nag remarked. Speaking on a panel titled “Deep Dive: India’s AI edge” was the CEO of DIBD, along with Yotta Data Services co-founder and CEO Sunil Gupta.
“We have 80% of the way to go before we can train the models. We were hoping to be on the market by March 31, but we’ve changed our aim to either April 15 or April 30,” he continued.
Nag stated that the government is focusing on 50 of these use cases in total. For instance, the DIBD is translating FIRs that have been submitted in local languages as well as judgment documents in the judiciary.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi utilized the platform to live translate a speech he was making in Tamil to Hindi last year, which catapulted Bhashini into the spotlight. Among Bhashini’s services, Nag characterized the live speech translation as the most intricate (voice-to-text, document translation and so on)
“To provide Bhashini, PM Modi made use of the most challenging feature in our whole portfolio: simultaneous voice translation… We had promised a six-second wait for the translation to happen when PM Modi used simultaneous language translation. However, the delay is now only one second,” Nag remarked.
The DIBD CEO made this statement following a live demonstration of the live speech translation feature, in which Nag talked to the Pune audience in English and the Bhashini platform translated it into Marathi in real time.
Nag concluded by saying that, in relation to Bhashini, the government will be working with startups more.
We plan to host numerous hackathons and large-scale challenges related to every Bhashini activity. Startups create Bhashini’s products, like speech-to-speech, video translation, and document translation,” he continued.
