Chennai: Bodhan AI, a Centre of Excellence in AI for Education incubated at IIT Madras, and AI4Bharat have launched a set of open artificial intelligence models for Indian languages in collaboration with NVIDIA, the organisations said on Friday.

The models cover four areas -- speech recognition, text-to-speech, machine translation and optical character recognition (OCR).

The initiative aims to help developers, researchers, startups, educational institutions and government agencies build and adapt AI tools for Indian languages, including regional dialects and accents.

The organisations said they are using the NVIDIA NeMo framework to train models for automatic speech recognition, machine translation and OCR. NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 ASR has also been post-trained to support Indian languages.

The models are being made available through open-weight releases and hosted application programming interfaces (APIs), allowing users to adapt them for specific applications or integrate them into their own systems.

Bodhan AI and AI4Bharat said the initiative will focus particularly on education, where the models can be used with voice, text and scanned documents to support students and teachers in regional languages.

“ANTHE has never been just an examination that determines a student's scholarship,” Prof Mitesh Khapra, principal investigator at Bodhan AI and AI4Bharat, said.

Editor's note: The quote in the source release refers to ANTHE and appears to have been copied from another release. It should not be used in this story. A corrected quote from Prof Khapra is needed before publication.

Bodhan AI said its educational applications will remain free for learners, educators and partnering state governments.

The organisations are also working together on datasets, training methods and evaluations for future foundational models for Indian languages.

Bodhan AI is a Section 8 company incubated at IIT Madras and funded by the Ministry of Education. It is developing the Bharat EduAI Stack as a digital public infrastructure for education.