Bangalore Lab developing AI Model for 100+ Indian languages, set to power Bard: Google Research India Director

Google AI Lab in Bengaluru is currently developing an AI model to support over 100 Indian languages, which will be integrated into various Google products including its generative AI tool Bard, Manish Gupta, Director of Google Research India, said during a session at the BT Tech Today Congress.

“Our team has been taking the lead on building multilingual models. Initially, we released a model which provided support for 16 Indian languages. It was used in the Google Assistant product as well as made available to the researchers and practitioners. We are now working on a model which will support over 100 Indian languages. Some of these models are beginning to make their way into some of the Google products, not just existing products like Assistant, but also upcoming products like Bard. We have been working closely with those teams to improve their capability to understand and respond in Indian languages,” Gupta said.

Google launched AI research lab in Bengaluru during its fifth edition of Google for India event in 2019. The company stated, at the time, that the lab would have a dual focus. Firstly, it aims to advance fundamental computer science and AI research through team-building and partnerships. Secondly, the lab will apply this research to address significant challenges in healthcare, agriculture, education sectors, and enhance the functionality of widely-used apps and services.

“Ours is a relatively young lab. We started less than four years ago, and pretty much the entire team was built from scratch. We had this very intense focus on both making foundational contributions to AI as well as applying it to solve big problems, especially those that are inspired by the Indian context,” he said.

Gupta said his team at is actively working towards democratizing access to information by developing multilingual models. These models will offer comprehensive support for multiple languages within a single system. The team has been collecting speech samples from 773 districts across India in partnership with Indian Institute of Science.

“We believe that AI has this enormous potential to benefit humanity and which was why one of our very clear focus right from the day one of inception of the lab was to develop AI in a manner that brings the benefits to the underprivileged,” he said.

He said the AI lab's efforts have yielded significant impact, such as helping to improve the health of expecting mothers and their babies.

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