CIIL to launch mobile app for learning 22 Indian languages

Shailendra Mohan, Director of CIIL, Mysuru, on Thursday announced two major initiatives to be launched by the end of this month - a mobile app for learning 22 Indian languages which will eventually expand to other mother tongues, and an AI-based language assessment system enabling nationwide proficiency testing.

Presiding over the 57th foundation day of CIIL here, Mr. Mohan highlighted CIIL’s technological advancements, including machine translation tools, text-to-speech systems, and multilingual corpora accessible via medha.ciil.org

Mr. Mohan shared details about the translation of ‘The Constitution of India’ into 11 Indian languages and reaffirmed CIIL’s dedication to linguistic diversity and its pivotal role in national language planning.

Udaya Narayana Singh, former Director, CIIL, in his keynote address, spoke on the future of language and literature studies in India, and the urgent need for indigenous linguistic data to fuel Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and speech technology.

He urged linguists to enrich Indian language archives and begin engaging in creative literature writing.

Mr. Singh also advocated for the creation of a Museum of Voices to support endangered and tribal languages, and called for multilingual education in line with NEP-2020, culturally sensitive AI, and mobile applications for minority languages.

He stressed using voice interfaces for non-literate users and proposed multilingual diagnostic tools to address the mental health issues of youth.

Mr. Singh spoke on underexplored domains such as Forensic Linguistics and language in law, and laid out a 20-year vision blending cultural heritage with digital innovation for CIIL’s future growth.

Vice-chancellor of Deccan College, Pune, Prasad Joshi; Founder-Director of CIIL D.P. Pattanayak; and former Directors of CIIL Rajesh Sachdeva and C.G. Venkatesh Murthy also spoke at the event.