Following the success of its Vconsol platform, which has been adopted by the Union government as its official video conferencing solution under the brand name Bharat VC, Alappuzha-based Techgentsia Software Technologies Pvt Ltd's solution for speech-to-speech translation has won the Bhashini Grand Innovation Challenge. The company has been awarded 50 lakhs and a contract for government projects in the sector.
Joy Sebastian, CEO of Techgentsia, revealed that the Bhashini Grand Innovation Challenge was held in four stages. "We excelled at every stage. The four stages were spread over eight months. Our official entry was a multilingual webinar on the Vconsol platform. However, at the prototype and product stages, different use cases emerged that required four different tools," he explains.
"The Ministry of Electronics and IT initiated the Bhashini division to enable speech-to-speech audio translation and text-to-text translation in various Indian languages using artificial intelligence (AI) to overcome the limitations of India's linguistic diversity with the help of technology."
Pre-trained AI models in various Indian languages are made available through the Bhashini platform. "It is available as open application programming interfaces (APIs). The Bhashini Innovation Challenge aimed to build various applications using these,".
"The challenge included two problem statements. The first was live speech-to-speech translation, and the second was document text translation. We competed in the first category. Techgentsia developed four products in the real-time speech-to-speech category.
"Our products are developed in a way that any such services available on the cloud using AI can be plugged in. The language models of Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have already been set up," says Joy.
The company's flagship product, Vconsol, enabled translation into different Indian languages during video conferencing. "Our products are developed in such a way that any such services available on the cloud using AI can be plugged in,".