Google has launched an ambitious initiative called the “Morni Project” to bridge the digital divide and preserve India’s linguistic heritage using advanced AI technologies.
Morni, which stands for Multimodal Representation for India, aims to develop artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities across 125 Indian languages and dialects. The project is spearheaded by Google DeepMind’s India unit.
This project acknowledges India’s rich linguistic diversity, where 22 languages are officially recognized, but over 125 languages are spoken by more than 100,000 people each.
According to Manish Gupta, Director of Google DeepMind, India, 73 of the 125 shortlisted languages lack digital data. This gap is notable even for widely spoken languages like Hindi, which, despite having nearly 10% of the world’s speakers, represents only 0.1% of the text available on the internet.
To address these digital footprint challenges, Google has partnered with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and ARTPARK (Artificial Intelligence & Robotics Technology Park) under a sub-project named Vaani.
The first phase of Vaani has successfully compiled an open-source database with over 14,000 hours of speech data across 58 languages. As Morni progresses, it is poised to be a transformative project that will bridge the digital divide and preserve India’s linguistic heritage through advanced AI technologies. The initiative is expected to significantly impact accessibility, education, and cultural preservation in the digital age.
