Google DeepMind’s India unit is working on an Indic language artificial intelligence project called Morni (Multimodal Representation for India), with an aim to cover 125 Indian languages and dialects.

According to him, 73 of these 125 languages had zero corpus of digital data available.

Even for a language like Hindi, which is now spoken by close to 10% of the world's population, the share of text on the internet is 0.1%.

Google’s research lab overcame the challenge of sourcing data for these languages by launching a project, Vaani — a collaboration among Google, Indian Institute of Science and ARTPARK (Artificial Intelligence & Robotics Technology Park). 

The project has completed its first phase to create an open-source database of over 14,000 hours of speech data in 58 languages, collected from 80,000 speakers in 80 districts, Gupta said.