During his address at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit on July 4, Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled Bhashini, an AI-based language translation tool developed indigenously in India.

"We would be delighted to share India's AI-based language platform Bhashini with everyone to remove language barriers within SCO. It can become an example of digital technology and inclusive growth," Modi said, while addressing SCO heads of state, including Russia's Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, Iran's Ebrahim Raisi and Pakistan's Shehbaz Sharif.

Launched in July of last year, Bhashini, also known as the National Language Technology Mission (NLTM), aims to offer language technology solutions as digital public goods through its platform.

The aim of the local language translation mission is to leverage modern technology to overcome barriers among various Indian languages. This government portal intends to provide AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) resources in the public domain for the benefit of Indian MSMEs, startups, and individual innovators.

Digital India Bhashini Division (DIBD), operating within the Independent Business Division (IBD) of Digital India Corporation (DIC), has been established to spearhead Mission Bhashini initiatives and foster the language technology ecosystem, with a particular focus on supporting startups.

With access to over a thousand pre-trained AI models, the Bhashini platform offers an extensive range of AI language models. Additionally, these AI language models are accessible to Bhashini ecosystem partners through Open Bhashini APIs. This application enables real-time speech translation into multiple local languages.

The objective is to establish a collaborative community of contributors dedicated to achieving Bhashini's goals. Bhashini aims to develop an integrative architecture based on open data and open-source software principles, allowing contributions from both research endeavors and the wider ecosystem. This approach fosters collaboration within the ecosystem, encouraging the development of diverse solutions on top of an integrated strategy.

Bhashini's ecosystem encompasses various stakeholders including central and state governments, research and academia groups, industries, start-ups, publishers, data collection and curation companies, language missions, and individuals.

Stakeholder contributions will enhance the accessibility of multilingual content, enabling users to utilize the internet more seamlessly in their native languages. Bhashini serves as an open data resource for digitally empowering users' languages. 

The platform provides a user-friendly experience, allowing effortless translation between local languages and English. Within the website, a dedicated section called "Anuvaad" offers a convenient way to input text into one box and have it translated into the desired language.