Imagine a construction worker from Odisha going to Bangalore to find work. Or a citizen from interior Nagaland trying to interact with the state government. Language is a barrier to both these people and it can make livelihoods rather challenging. But current research in AI – from deep neural networks to massive multi-lingual models – are already trying to solve this problem. 

Credits: 

Narration: Harsha Bhogle

Executive Producer: Gaurav Vaz

Producer: Archana Nathan

Research, Interviews and Scripts: Vinay Aravind

Narrative overview: Charu Sharma and Shriram Parthasarathy

Title track, sound design and background score: Nikhil Rao and Abhijit Nath. 

All clips and voices used in this podcast are owned by the original creators We thank wholeheartedly all our guests who appeared on this episode 

• Dr. Shobha Satyanath, a professor of linguistics at Delhi University 


• Kalika Bali, Principal Researcher, Microsoft India 


• Dr. Monojit Chowdhury, Principal Data and Applied Scientist with Turing 


• Dr. Vivek Seshadri, a researcher at Microsoft India. 

Links to clips used in the episode and citations: 

• The Language Barrier Plaguing India's Stock Market | Mint (livemint.com) 


• Jawaharlal Nehru’s Tryst with Destiny speech


• 780 Indian languages surveyed and documented by PLSI, next aim to document 6000 world languages | India News The Indian Express 


• List of the 122 census recognised languages of India, including Scheduled and Non-Scheduled Languages 


• Prof. G.N. Devy: 'All our languages are losing linguistic prowess' - Frontline (thehindu.com) 


• Deep Learning Neural Networks Explained in Plain English (freecodecamp.org) 


• Artificial Intelligence wrote this entire video. Are you scared yet, human? 


• Project Karya - Microsoft Research 


• ELLORA: Enabling Low Resource Languages - Microsoft Research 


• Microsoft Turing Universal Language Representation model, T-ULRv5, tops XTREME leaderboard and trains 100x faster - Microsoft Research 


• CGNet Swara’s website


• Cognitive Services—APIs for AI Solutions | Microsoft Azure