FAIR Forward project initiatives in India
Artificial Intelligence: Voice technologies in Indian languages
The FAIR Forward project in India, global initiative of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) implemented by GIZ, supports the localisation of AI, opening up of AI trained data sets including data protection and privacy for the development of voice technologies.
As a first step, a study on “Open AI Voice Datasets in India” was published last year, contributing to the objective of creating a pool of language datasets in text, speech and other formats for all languages in the country. Upon release of the report, an informal ‘Working Group in Voice Technologies’ was constituted for discussions on the potential and initiatives for voice technologies in India.
FAIR Forward’s initiatives in India aims at developing services built on human-machine interaction in the local language, such as in information hotlines or automated customer services. Currently, work is ongoing on
a) advancing voice technologies usage in sectors such as agriculture and climate risk insurance and opening-up data and AI models
b) two new publications – “AI handbook on Data Protection and Data Privacy for AI developers in India” (release mid-July) and a study on “Open Earth Observation (EO) trained datasets in India” (to be released mid-August). Recently, the project also signed a grant agreement with the Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc), Bangalore for work on Text-to-speech synthesizer in nine Indian languages.
Click below to read article written by the Working Group in Voice Technologies on the importance of accessible open voice datasets, central data repositories promoted via multi-stakeholder approach in India. Article published on indiaai.gov.in – a national portal on Artificial Intelligence under the joint initiative of MeitY (Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology), NeGD (National e-Governance Division) & NASSCOM.
More information: FAIR Forward – Artificial Intelligence for All – Toolkit Digitalisierung (toolkit-digitalisierung.de).
Contact Person
Gaurav Sharma (gaurav.sharma1@giz.de)
Advisor for AI, India
FAIR Forward – Artificial Intelligence for All
