IIT-Madras-backed Bodhan AI launches 4 foundational AI models
What's the story
Bodhan AI, a Section 8 company incubated at IIT-Madras and funded by the Union Education Ministry, has launched four foundational artificial intelligence (AI) models for Indian languages. The move is part of a larger effort to create a sovereign technology layer for India's multilingual education ecosystem. The models were developed in collaboration with AI4Bharat and are released as digital public goods on sovereign digital infrastructure.
Model details
Models cover ASR, OCR, MT, TTS
The four AI models launched by Bodhan AI cover automatic speech recognition (ASR), optical character recognition (OCR), machine translation (MT), and text-to-speech (TTS).
The ASR model supports 27 languages while the OCR and TTS models support 23 languages each. Bodhan-Translate, the machine translation model, supports 22 Indian languages.
These models are meant to be building blocks for edtech companies, startups, researchers, universities, tech companies, and government partners to build their applications on.
Expert opinion
Sovereign digital public infrastructure for AI in education
IIT-Madras Director Professor V Kamakoti stressed the significance of these voice and vision models in creating a sovereign digital public infrastructure for AI in education.
He said it would cater to India's linguistic diversity and enable innovation at scale.
The models were trained using NVIDIA Nemotron open models and libraries from the NVIDIA NeMo framework for speech recognition, machine translation, and OCR.
Strategic move
Open approach to reduce duplication
Bodhan AI's open approach is aimed at reducing duplication across India's education technology ecosystem.
Professor Mitesh Khapra, Principal Investigator at Bodhan AI, said they want to "build with the ecosystem, not compete with it."
This common layer can power education AI applications without institutions having to duplicate the same foundational work.
New tools
Student tutor bot launching
Along with the AI models, Bodhan AI is also launching a student tutor bot and a teacher assistant bot.
The student bot is aimed at students in classes 6-12 and is built around NCERT and SCERT curricula.
It can interact with students through text or voice across 22 Indian languages, using textbook content to provide explanations, examples, and assessments.