The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B) has developed new software that uses artificial intelligence to enable the real-life translation of classroom lectures. The Speech-to-Speech Machine Translation (SSMT) system can translate from English to Hindi, English to Marathi, and Hindi to Marathi. The software, Bahubhaashak (polyglot), was exhibited at IIT-Delhi’s IInvenTiv, an event exhibiting R&D work from all 23 IITs.
Bahubhaashak, developed by the Center for Indian Language Technology (CFILT) at IIT Bombay’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering, was originally sponsored as a pilot project by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) in 2020. The National Language Translation Mission (NLTM) of the Ministry has included it as a comprehensive initiative that will be used for revenue generation.
Also read| IITs Go Multidisciplinary, Delhi, Bombay Campus Update Syllabus After Over a Decade
“We are planning to provide this technology to private engineering colleges to enable them to translate English lectures into local languages. We are also talking to the Bombay High Court to help them translate into Hindi court cases that are transferred to them from lower courts in local languages,” IIT-Bombay professor Pushpak Bhattacharya told a leading news daily.
The translation process is divided into four steps. First, automatic speech recognition (ASR) transforms spoken language into text and corrects for vocal slowdowns. Following that, the text in one language is converted into another chosen language via machine translation. It is then rendered into speech in the chosen language. The entire procedure takes around two seconds. The software is accessible as a web service, and there are plans to create a mobile application that will initially be available to everyone without any charges, said the institute.
The governmental backing for Bahubhaashak comes against the backdrop of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which emphasises encouraging linguistic diversity and proposing mother tongue or regional languages as a medium of teaching in schools, and universities. The IIT-Delhi’s IInvenTiv event took place on October 14 and 15. The software has been developed by the prestigious institute in close cooperation with IIT Madras, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), and IIIT Hyderabad.
Read all the Latest Education News and Breaking News here
Comments
0 comment