MeitY, Lok Sabha Secretariat Partner To Build Sansad Bhashini

SUMMARY

The initiative will provide comprehensive in-house AI solutions in the parliament to streamline parliamentary operations as well as offer multilingual support

The two entities will work on building AI tools to translate legacy parliamentary debates, provide interactive chatbots to assist Lok Sabha members, among others

Translation capabilities and other technical expertise will be contributed by the government's AI-powered language translation platform, Bhashini

In a bid to better democratise parliamentary operations, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Lok Sabha secretariat have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to develop an AI-powered solution, the Sansad Bhashini.

In a statement, the central government said that the initiative will provide comprehensive in-house AI solutions in the parliament to streamline parliamentary operations as well as offer multilingual support.

Sansad Bhashini will see the two aforementioned government entities leverage parliamentary data and resources to develop AI tools. Meanwhile, translation capabilities and other technical expertise will be contributed by the government’s AI-powered language translation platform, Bhashini.

Key features of the Sansad Bhashni are as follows:

AI-powered translation of legacy parliamentary debate documents, agenda files, committee meetings, and other content into regional languages.
An AI-powered interactive chatbot to assist Lok Sabha members and officials in retrieving critical procedural rules and documents.
Speech-to-text of spoken parliamentary debates into text with transcription across in Indian languages. Besides, a speech-to-speech conversion of the debates will also be hosted by the Sansad Bhashini.

“The “Sansad Bhashini” initiative is proving useful for smooth functioning of Parliament related work and for making proceedings available to Hon’ble Members in multiple languages simultaneously. This will enable our Hon’ble Members of Parliament, researchers and academia to easily access translation of Parliament debates in any language,” Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla said in a post on X.

Interestingly, the launch comes a couple of days later from PM Narendra Modi’s appearance on a podcast with Lex Friedman. The podcast, which featured Modi converse in Hindi while Friedman spoke in English, was converted to English and Hindi using ElevenLabs’ natural-sounding speech synthesis software using deep learning.

Amid rising adoption of GenAI across the globe, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said that India’s youth and talent pool is the country’s biggest asset and will drive the progress of AI.

“Without genuine human intelligence, AI can’t thrive or progress sustainably, and that real intelligence exists abundantly in India’s youth and talent pool, and I believe that’s our greatest asset,” Modi said during the podcast.

The Centre has been a proponent of promoting AI adoption within the country. Last year, the government launched the IndiaAI Mission to build a high-end scalable AI computing ecosystem with a capacity of 10,000 or more GPUs via public-private partnerships. This initiative includes an AI marketplace designed to offer AI as a service and pre-trained models to AI innovators.

To foster private-public partnership in the emerging space, MeitY invited applications from Indian startups and enterprises for building an India-specific AI foundational model under the government’s flagship INR 10,370 Cr IndiaAI Mission.

At the end of February, the center had released at least 67 proposals for building the indigenously-designed and developed AI foundational model.