Video Editor: Purnendu Pritam
At Quint Hindi and Google’s ‘BOL - Love Your Bhasha event’, the focus was on how to achieve digital democracy in regional digital media, the kind of changes that are needed in tech policies and who can take what responsibilities when it comes to the reach of Indian languages.
When asked about the steps that the government must take to ensure Indian languages flourish on the internet, Saurabh Gupta, co-founder of Vernacular.AI said that a lot of professors and directors of IIT who have been doing a lot of research on NLP (Natural Language Processing) receive funds but are deprived of necessary data. DRDO also created the speech data set 12 years ago. The government should pay attention to providing necessary data, he said.
Arvind Pani, co-founder of Revari Language Technology, said that the government must contribute at the infrastructural level for solving issues. “We need strong representation in bodies that define standards for Indian languages like the Unicode consortium. So at the fundamental, building-block level, I would expect the government to do a lot more,” said Pani.
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