BHASHINI CEO Amitabh Nag Outlines Vision for AI-Driven Language Inclusion at Republic AI Pre-Summit

At the Republic AI Pre-Summit, Amitabh Nag, CEO of BHASHINI, shared how India’s own AI-powered language platform is breaking down the country’s language barriers and making governance, services, and technology truly inclusive.

Speaking at the high-impact gathering hosted by Republic TV, Nag said, “Bhashini is about transcending the language barrier. It is built for us, by us, to solve India’s own language challenges.”

Bhashini, the national language translation mission under the Ministry of Electronics and IT, is a section 8 division under Digital India Corporation. Nag said that the platform now supports 36 languages in text and 24 in voice, and has enabled over 3 billion language inferences, which means that “three billion times, language was not a barrier.”

He explained that Bhashini solves five major problems: automatic speech recognition, machine translation, text-to-speech, OCR for printed and handwritten material, and the creation of digital dictionaries in Indian languages. “We are making computers understand what you speak, translate it, and respond to you in your own language,” Nag said.

Bhashini collaborated with over 70 educational institutions to build AI models for 22 scheduled Indian languages. “It is like democratizing AI to an extent never imagined before,” said Nag. The platform is now used in diverse applications from parliament transcription to rural grievance redressal, and even digital Aadhaar enrolment in remote hospitals via voice-enabled forms.

Bhashini mobile app has crossed 1 million downloads and allows real-time translation. Other key products include Anoad (Text-to-text translation), Chitraad (video translation into 22 languages), Leha(OCR-based document reading), Vaniad (real-time multilingual voice conversations) and a Translation plug-in that instantly converts websites to 22 Indian languages

The Republic AI Pre-Summit serves as a precursor to the upcoming Republic Mega AI Summit, where India’s larger AI vision will be unveiled at scale. Nag’s presentation made it clear that Bhashini will play a central role in India’s multilingual AI revolution.

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