New Delhi: Voice-first multilingual AI, speech-to-text, translation, optical character recognition (OCR) and document translation can support multilingual access in academic and research settings, according to government officials at the 29th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD-2026), held at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi from October 23 to 25, IANS reported on Sunday.

Source: IANS, via IANS Live

The Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD), under Digital India Corporation and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), participated in the symposium. Baishali Chakraborty, speaking on behalf of DIBD, conducted a workshop titled 'AI BHASHINI: Bridging Divides and Increasing Productivity', highlighting BHASHINI's Language-First Digital Public Infrastructure for universities, libraries and research repositories, according to the official statement reproduced by India Education Diary.

Source: PIB / DIBD official statement, via India Education Diary

A live demonstration of Shrutlekh showcased real-time speech transcription with simultaneous translation, illustrating potential applications in lecture halls, research seminars, conferences and academic discussions. A key focus was extending AI-powered translation to electronic theses and dissertations, including lengthy and specialised academic documents; BHASHINI Pragati, a document translation workbench developed for the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, was presented as an example of structured document translation and review.

Harshad Sharma said making research and scholarly knowledge accessible across Indian languages is an important step towards a more inclusive knowledge ecosystem, Nation Press reported. The division said its broader ecosystem brings together language datasets, AI models, APIs and applications for uses ranging from citizen services to higher education and research repositories.

Source: Nation Press (IANS)