Leveraging AI to enhance the educational experience for diverse populations.
Literacy is a basic human right. It opens up various opportunities that transcend factors like geographical locations, industries and disciplines, laying a foundation on which they can build important values such as respect, values, integrity, cultural sensitivity, solidarity and more.
Why Multilingual education?
Due to the rapid development of technology and communication, global citizenship is now almost a norm for many. We need cultural and linguistic sensitivity more than ever today. Language and culture are linked intricately, and many communities are facing a gap in their learning with respect to their mother tongues. Many native languages have today been overridden by more dominant languages.
On the other hand, studies by organisations like UNICEF and UNESCO have shown that learning in the mother tongue helps students make better connections between the concepts they are developing and the cultural values they have been taught through their respective native languages, especially in childhood.
Many online services are also only available in a limited number of languages, causing a divide when it comes to accessibility. The youth today is caught up with technological resources to advance their skills, but technology and the internet are not yet caught up with critical aspects of their development like linguistic diversity, causing gaps in learning due to lack of inclusivity.
What are we doing about this?
We at TAP acknowledge the gaps in education due to language barriers and are making efforts to reduce them. An attempt in this direction has been our collaboration with Bhashini, an AI tool developed by the Government of India aiming to make education and the digital space accessible in more languages. At TAP, our work is carried out across different states through in-school and after-school self learning modules. As we work across locations in a country as diverse as India, having multilingual provisions is essential. Being one of the few organisations to participate in the pilot testing for Bhashini, we added it onto TAP Buddy, our chatbot. Children are able to interact with this bot and ask questions relevant to their classes. With the language AI tool, children are able to ask questions in different languages over both voice and text, making their interactions easier since they are able to use their mother tongues instead of English, a language that everyone is not as fluent with or comfortable in. The bot also has a provision of identifying questions that are irrelevant to the student’s topic of study or have answers that must be addressed by an adult. Once identified, the bot responds negatively to the query, irrespective of the language.
What is Bhashini?
The goal of Bhashini is to use technology to provide translations in 22 scheduled Indian languages. This is a critical step in making knowledge accessible throughout the country. With an aim to “transcend language barriers”, Bhashini’s goal is to establish an intricate level of inclusivity when it comes to accessing digital services. This includes accessibility in everything from agriculture to health, education, e-commerce and finance. With features such as gender classification, audio language detection and a profanity filter, Bhashini is creating an ecosystem including stakeholders from different fields to make its impact widespread. As an essential development in academia combining linguistic diversity with AI and technology, TAP has had the opportunity to harness this tool effectively for our students.
“At Bhashini, our aim is to make multilingual voice communication a universal medium, breaking language barriers across various domains beyond text and images. Our focus is on working with customers to identify use cases, deploying innovative solutions, gathering feedback, collecting data, and continuously improving models and building innovative applications to ensure seamless communication in everyday life.”
Following a successful pilot testing, TAP is rolling the feature out in more languages. We believe in the need for more conversations on how to respect these languages, continue to carry the values they hold, and foster a culture of literacy and understanding in multiple languages. Through this innovative blend of language and AI, we are taking better informed decisions on inclusivity in education which are up to date with the latest technological advancements.
At The Apprentice Project (TAP), we believe kids need 21st century skills to navigate the 21st century world. A tech-enabled not-for-profit, TAP prepares children from disadvantaged backgrounds, enabling them to be thought leaders in their communities and beyond.