The Indian Institute of Technology Madras has commissioned the Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat to advance Indian language technology. The centre, which has made several cutting-edge language AI resources open source, is funded through a grant of ₹36 crore from Nilekani Philanthropies. Nandan Nilekani inaugurated the centre on Thursday.
AI4Bharat was set up as an initiative of the institute to build open-source language AI for Indian languages. Mitesh M. Khapra, Pratyush Kumar and Anoop Kunchukuttan lead the team that has developed state-of-the-art models for machine translation and speech recognition.