Mumbai, September 10: The Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD), which functions under the Digital India Corporation (DIC) at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), held a workshop at Maharashtra Mantralaya with the state’s Language Department to look at how multilingual and voice-enabled artificial intelligence can widen access to digital services, government information and citizen-facing applications in the languages people actually use.
The discussions centred on the role of Language AI in making digital governance more inclusive and citizen-centric, particularly by bringing language technology closer to citizens in Marathi and other Indian languages. Officials and BHASHINI representatives spoke about the need for digital systems that can understand, process and communicate in the languages people use in their everyday lives.
Live demonstrations of speech and translation tools
The BHASHINI team demonstrated its multilingual AI capabilities live, running through speech recognition, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, translation and voice-enabled interaction. The demonstrations showed how these tools could be built into public services to make interactions between citizens and digital systems more natural.
Building language data through BhashaDaan
A large part of the workshop dealt with the need for high-quality, representative language data to build AI systems that work well locally. Participants discussed how language experts, government institutions, academia and communities could contribute more to strengthening language datasets for Marathi and other Indian languages. BhashaDaan, BHASHINI’s crowdsourcing initiative, lets citizens contribute language data towards this effort.
The workshop also looked at department-specific Language AI, including the addition of specialised terminology used across different government departments. This, officials said, could improve how government content is understood and processed, and support more effective multilingual communication across public services.
MahaBHASHINI and areas for collaboration
Discussions also touched on a Maharashtra-focused multilingual AI ecosystem, including a proposed concept called MahaBHASHINI, which could support language-inclusive services in areas such as tourism and transport. The workshop gave both sides a chance to identify priority use cases and areas where the Maharashtra government and BHASHINI could work together.
The workshop brought together government officials, language experts and other stakeholders to exchange ideas and look at possible collaboration on language technology, datasets, research and real-world applications of Language AI.
The engagement at Maharashtra Mantralaya is another step in Centre-State collaboration on building a multilingual digital ecosystem, where language becomes a means of access, participation and digital empowerment.
About the Digital India BHASHINI Division
The Digital India BHASHINI Division, under the Digital India Corporation at MeitY, is building a national ecosystem for AI-powered multilingual digital inclusion. BHASHINI supports 36 Indian text languages, 23 Indian voice languages and 35 international languages, and powers more than 800 government websites. It has enabled over 9 billion cumulative AI inferences and processes more than 24 million AI inferences daily. Its National Hub for Language Technology (NHLT) is one of the largest inferencing platforms in the Global South, supporting the growing use of Language AI across government and public-facing digital services.