Indian Govt AI Translation Platform Bhashini Gears Up for Monetization

Indian government-run AI translation and database platform Bhashini is set to transition to a paid service model. Initiated by the Digital India Bhashini division under the Digital India Corporation, the platform has been primarily serving various government and private entities without charge.

However, according to CEO Amitabh Nag, this will change as Bhashini starts to monetize its offerings based on the demand and complexity of the services required.

“We will be charging for many services which will come up over a period of time. We have already received orders worth crores (INR) from our customers. Government as well as private organizations have shown interest,” Nag said, adding that Bhashini is also doing proof of concepts for multilingual call centers or interactive voice recognition (IVR) setups.

Future Prospects 

Bhashini will mark its second anniversary in August and has already started to demonstrate its commercial viability. The platform's capabilities are broad, covering text-to-text translation in 22 languages, automated speech recognition, and more. Its real-time speech translation services have seen significant improvements, now supporting 12 languages with reduced translation lag, enhancing usability in real-time applications.

The platform’s technology stack has various applications across different sectors such as the judiciary, education, and financial services. Notably, the National Payment Corporation of India has collaborated with Bhashini to facilitate conversational payments in local languages through UPI, illustrating its practical utility in everyday transactions.

Bhashini also plans to launch an application that will showcase its real-time translation capabilities in an open demo format before introducing it as a paid service. The platform’s development is supported by collaboration with over 70 research institutes, aiming to refine and enhance the AI models used.

The platform's workforce is expected to expand, reflecting its growing operational demands and its role in supporting multilingual and voice-enabled services for diverse sectors, including e-commerce.

In addition to technological advancements, Bhashini also emphasizes community involvement through Bhashadaan, a crowdsourcing initiative that helps improve and expand the datasets used by the platform.