Nilekani said this during a fireside chat with Ajay Sawhney, secretary in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Debjani Ghosh, president of IT industry body Nasscom.
The interaction was organised by INDIAai, a national AI portal set up by MeitY, National E-Governance Division and Nasscom.
“The work that MeitY is doing on the national language translation mission is a disruptive opportunity,” Nilekani said.
“India is unique in the fact that it has such a large number of languages, all co-mingling, and most Indians speak two to three languages and so on. Creating the world’s best language capability, whether its speech, text to speech, whether its language to language, I think India is well placed to show the world how to do it,” he added.
Sawhney, speaking on the National AI Mission – on which MeitY is working jointly with the NITI Aayog – said that the core research would give “not just length but a tremendous amount of depth in coverage in terms of technology,” across various areas/sectors of application.
Sawhney also spoke about the creation of a national public digital platform for healthcare, which knits together all healthcare providers on one platform.
