Digital India BHASHINI Division Showcases Voice-First Multilingual AI at Uttar Pradesh AI Innovation and Capacity Building Conference

The Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD), Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), participated in the AI Led Innovation and Capacity Building Conference, organised by the Centre for e-Governance (CeG), IT and Electronics Department, Government of Uttar Pradesh, on 20 January 2026 at Lucknow. The conference brought together senior officials of the State Government, representatives of the Government of India, industry partners and academic institutions to deliberate on strengthening Artificial Intelligence adoption, digital skilling and innovation capacity in the State.

The programme included technical sessions on AI applications, industry collaboration, skilling initiatives and State AI programmes, including the FutureSkills PRIME Programme and the AI PRAGYA initiative, with a focus on building institutional and human capacity for responsible and scalable AI adoption.

A dedicated technical session focused on the BHASHINI platform and its role in enabling multilingual and voice-first digital governance. The session highlighted the deployment of translation APIs, automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech and conversational AI tools for integration into citizen-facing services and administrative workflows, enabling inclusive access to digital public services across linguistic groups. A live demonstration of Shrutlekh, BHASHINI's speech-to-text and translation tool, was conducted during the session, showcasing real-time transcription and multilingual translation for governance use cases.

Shri Amitabh Nag, Chief Executive Officer, Digital India BHASHINI Division, delivered a presentation titled "Sharing Experiences in Co-Creating an AI-Based, Voice-First, Multilingual Platform." He stated, "Artificial Intelligence can serve citizens effectively only when it understands Indian languages and is trained on indigenous data that reflects local contexts and usage."

The session underscored BHASHINI's approach to building multilingual AI capacity rooted in Indian linguistic realities, recognising that effective AI systems must be trained on indigenous data reflecting everyday language use across regions and sectors. The mission promotes citizen participation in language data contribution and validation, supported by collaboration with startups, academia and industry. Capacity building is embedded across the AI lifecycle, from data creation and annotation to real-world deployment and continuous improvement through feedback, enabling the development of language AI systems that evolve with sustained usage.

The presentation highlighted the operational scale of the BHASHINI platform, including support for more than 36 languages in text and over 22 languages in voice, deployment of over 350 AI language models, integration across more than 500 websites and over 100 live use cases, and coverage of regional dialects such as Awadhi and Braj, enabling deeper local engagement.

The participation of the Digital India BHASHINI Division reaffirmed its role in supporting State Governments in deploying multilingual, voice-enabled and AI-driven solutions to strengthen accessibility, service delivery and citizen-centric digital governance. The engagement aligns with the Government of India's vision of integrating Indian languages into Digital Public Infrastructure and advancing inclusive AI-enabled governance across States.

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MSZ