One Fourth Labs
We deliver courseware in AI and related areas
@ IIT Madras
The AI4Bharat Initiative
Associate Professor, IIT Madras
PhD, IIT Bombay
Mitesh M. Khapra
Pratyush Kumar
Anoop Kunchukuttan
Researcher, Microsoft Research
Adjunct Professor, IIT Madras
PhD, ETH Zürich
Researcher, Microsoft
PhD, IIT Bombay
100+ academic papers
30+ US patents
Recognized by
Experience
Team
Research expertise
Academic, industry, and startup experience
Mission statement
Bring parity with English
in AI tech for Indian languages
with open source contributions
We want to be the Apache for Indian languages AI stack
मी तुम्हाला प्रतिकिलो 100 रुपये देऊ शकतो
100 கிலோ அரிசியை விற்க விரும்புகிறேன்
What would it take for a farmer in TN to talk to a wholesaler in Maharashtra?
We need to solve four fundamental problems
Speech Recognition
Language Understanding
Machine Translation
Speech Synthesis
Why is this problem hard?
Open source all datasets and AI models with permissible licenses
Build a coalition of partners to collect datasets and deploy models
বা
हि
ಕ
म
ଓ
த
മ
తె
অ
कॉ
ગુ
ने
कों
सं
ਪੰ
सिं
اُر
ब
मै
Scale and Diversity
Unique language phenomenon
mujhe bahut confusion hai
Scarcity of resources
Lack of basic speech and NLP tools
Named Entity Recognition
Sentiment Analysis
Topic Classification
Content Filters
Keyboards
Spell checkers
Indian languages lag on academic benchmarks
Speech Recognition
Language Understanding
Machine Translation
Speech Synthesis
Why this is foundational for the social sector?
Open source all datasets and AI models with permissible licenses
Build a coalition of partners to collect datasets and deploy models
Indian language + voice support =
Key to interface Bharat
Why this unlocks commercial value?
Open source all datasets and AI models with permissible licenses
Build a coalition of partners to collect datasets and deploy models
Creating solutions based on local needs and behaviour is critical to improving user engagement
Consumer Survey,
Feb 2018, Bain Analysis
Voice could play a
pivotal role in enabling
e-governance and
bringing next 300 million
Indians to digital
platform
Nasscom Survey,
2019
Indian language users are expected to account for 75% of India' internet user base
KPMG/Google Survey,
2018
Chat & entertainment
Social media & news
Digital write-ups, payments, e-governance, e-commerce, search
Have we solved parts of this problem?
Speech Recognition
Language Understanding
Machine Translation
Speech Synthesis
Mined 33 million
parallel sentences
Built billion parameter translation models
Our models for En to 11 Indian languages beat
all models (including
Google, Microsoft)
Who is using our translation models?
NGO for book translation
Govt. for website translation
Fiction book translation
Judgment
translation
Feedback from users
“The quality of translations is significantly improved. I would say this is more so for the legal document where there were complicated sentences/cards which were translated very well. The syntax mostly did not falter even in the face of multiple ideas/information contained in one sentence.”
“The amount of time spent on correcting/improving the translation has dropped.”
“THIS IS VERY PROMISING. AMAZED BY THE SPEED.”
“I TOOK A PRINTOUT AND WENT THROUGH EVERY LINE. THE TRANSLATION IS 98% ACCURATE AND HIGHLY SATISFIED.”
What we want to do in the next 5 years?
Language Understanding
Machine Translation
Speech Synthesis
Speech Recognition
Create and release datasets
Train and open source AI models
Build deployable tools
Outreach to
drive use
Driving Science
Driving Adoption
What are our milestones?
Year 1
Release models and datasets for MT and Language Understanding
Release speech-to-speech translation systems
Release models and datasets for Automatic Speech Recognition
Year 2
Year 5
Set up "The AI4Bharat Initiative" @
What do we need in the next 5 years?
Data
Team
Infrastructure
Outreach
Generate rural employment
Train 50 researchers (Residents, MS, PhD)
Bring compute parity to IITM
Handhold startups to innovate
The AI4Bharat Initiative (without budget)
By One Fourth Labs
The AI4Bharat Initiative (without budget)
The AI4Bharat Initiative
