Personal digital assistants can soon ‘converse’ with you in Telugu, and with a greater level of accuracy. The International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Hyderabad has embarked on an ambitious project of crowdsourcing at least 2,000 hours of speech in this language that could be used in such devices.
According to Prakash Yalla from IIIT’s Technology Transfer Office, the move comes after talks between various organisations and the Centre.
Around ₹1 crore has been earmarked for the project. The initiative seeks to give a large number of speakers of regional languages, such as Telugu, access to gadgets that use Artificial Intelligence enabled speech recognition such as Siri or Alexa.