Introducing – Digital #BhāṣāWeekly For Indian Language Tech & Localisation!

It’s an exciting time to be in language technology, and working on localising the Indian internet.

Now that India’s English speaking class is mostly already online, the focus is finally shifting to building the Indian language internet, something that was mostly ignored so far.

Keeping track of these advancements can be tough though. There’s so much going on all the time, as people – not all of them Indian – work on solving problems related to making the internet friendlier for the average Indian, allowing them to access its vast stores of information and services.

That’s why we’ve come up with Digital Bhāṣā Weekly. Every Monday, you will receive a curated list of articles on developments in the field of language technology and localisation in India over the past week, and what they mean for Indians and Indian languages themselves!

Let’s take a look at this week in language technology and localisation.

Apart from a chronic shortage of data, the phenomenon of code switching, or switching between multiple languages within the same conversation or even sentence makes it even harder to train machine learning systems in Indian languages and build databases. A team from Hyderabad is dealing with this by choosing to embrace this dynamic mixing of languages.

Recently, the folks at Google India revealed that 95% of video consumption on YouTube in India is in Indian languages. It’s an open secret that videos in Indian languages just do better than English ones, since they connect with a larger audience, and more intimately so. Video streaming platforms are looking to capitalize on this insatiable hunger for more digital content that speaks to India’s various regions in their own language.

Offline statistics show that Indian language news publications boast readership numbers that would easily dwarf those of the most read Indian English paper. Lack of technology has been a roadblock in this being replicated for digital platforms, however. At AFAQ’s Digipub World, industry leaders discussed how to get around these issues and bring digital Indian language publication into the mainstream.

Voice technology is fairly intuitive when you think about it. It basically lets you speak to a device and interact with platforms directly. Building voice technology for India involves a bunch of challenges, but the potential payoff is massive – you get to make digital devices a whole lot friendlier for hundreds of millions of Indians! Here’s more on how what voice and vernacular can do when paired.