KOCHI: Following up on 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 bagged Rs 50 lakh and a contract for government projects in the sector. Joy Sebastian, CEO of Techgentsia, says 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. But at the prototype and product stages, different use cases came into play that required four different tools,” he explains.
“The ministry of electronics and IT started the Bhashini division to enable speech-to-speech translation and text-to-text translation in various Indian languages with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) and 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 was to build various applications using this,” says Joy.
“The challenge included two problem statements. First was live speech-to-speech translation and second was document text translation. We competed in the first category. Techgentsia developed four products in the real-time speech-to-speech category. The company’s flagship product, Vconsol, enabled translation into different Indian languages during video conferencing. The first product enables live translation of a speech to the audience’s language at webinars.”
The second is “receiver-side translation” where video conference participants select the language they want to hear, he said. “In this, listeners choose the language in which they want the speech to be translated. Both tools make this possible by integrating the Bhashini API in video conferencing,” Joy adds.
The Bhashini platform is not the only one that works with products developed by Techgentsia. “Our products are developed in such a way that any such services available on the cloud using AI can be plugged in. In this, the language models of Microsoft, Google and Amazon have already been set up,” says Joy.