Bodhan AI, IIT Madras & NVIDIA Launch Open AI Models For Indic Languages Covering Speech, Translation, Text-to-Speech & OCR

Bodhan AI, IIT Madras & NVIDIA Launch Open AI Models For Indic Languages Covering Speech, Translation, Text-to-Speech & OCR

Bodhan AI, an IIT Madras-incubated AI centre, has partnered with NVIDIA and AI4Bharat to launch open foundational AI models for Indian languages. The suite covers speech recognition, text-to-speech, translation and OCR, with free educational applications for learners, teachers and state governments.

PTIUpdated: Saturday, September 12, 2026, 04:30 PM IST
Bodhan AI, IIT Madras & NVIDIA Launch Open AI Models For Indic Languages Covering Speech, Translation, Text-to-Speech & OCR
Bodhan AI, IIT Madras & NVIDIA Launch Open AI Models For Indic Languages Covering Speech, Translation, Text-to-Speech & OCR |

Chennai: Bodhan AI, an IIT Madras-incubated Centre of Excellence in AI for Education, announced on Friday a suite of open foundational AI models for Indic-languages developed in collaboration with NVIDIA.

The initiative works alongside AI4Bharat to release models spanning four core capabilities: speech recognition (Indic-Transcribe), text-to-speech (Indic-Speak), machine translation (Indic-Translate), and optical character recognition (Indic-OCR), according to a press release.

The models were developed using the NVIDIA NeMo framework, which includes post-training NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 ASR to support Indian regional dialects and accents. Inference is served using NVIDIA TensorRT LLM and vLLM microservices.

The initiative aims to accelerate the adoption of multilingual AI solutions across the broader Indian language AI ecosystem, specifically focused on education. Prof Mitesh Khapra, Principal Investigator at Bodhan AI and AI4Bharat, stated that the NVIDIA partnership accelerates bringing open, state-of-the-art capabilities to developers.

These foundational models are accessible through open-weight releases and hosted APIs within India's sovereign digital ecosystem. Educational applications leveraging these models will remain free for learners, teachers, and partnering state governments.

(Except for the headline, this article has not been edited by FPJ's editorial team and is auto-generated from an agency feed.)