IIIT Hyderabad Joins Adi Vaani AI Project for Tribal Languages

Hyderabad: As part of the Union government’s Janjatiya Gaurav Varsh celebrations marking the 150th birth anniversary of tribal icon Birsa Munda, the Ministry of Tribal Affairs has launched Adi Vaani, an AI-powered translator for tribal languages. Currently in its beta version, the app supports Santali, Bhili, Mundari, and Gondi, with plans to expand to Kui, Garo, and other indigenous languages. Available on Play Store and a dedicated web platform, the initiative is led by IIT Delhi with contributions from IIIT Hyderabad, BITS Pilani, IIIT Nava Raipur, and Tribal Research Institutes from five states.

According to the 2011 Census, India is home to 461 tribal languages, many of which are at risk of extinction. Adi Vaani aims to address this by enabling real-time text and speech translation between Hindi/English and tribal languages, preserving folklore and oral traditions, and promoting civic inclusion by making government schemes accessible in local dialects.

IIITH’s Technical Role

At IIIT Hyderabad, researchers from the Language Technologies Research Centre, led by Prof. Radhika Mamidi along with Prof. Anil Vuppala and a team of scholars, built machine translation systems using Transformer-based neural architectures. A parallel corpus was developed with the help of the Tribal Research Institute, Odisha, and refined with inputs from Santali native speakers. The team also created text-to-speech tools for Santali, Mundari, and Bhili, with Gondi in progress.

Highlighting the significance of the initiative, Prof. Mamidi noted that the project is not only about translation but also about preserving endangered languages, enabling inclusive governance, and ensuring access to education and healthcare information. IIITH further contributed through its Product Labs team, which provided cloud deployment support. Future plans include extending AI support to Telangana-origin languages such as Gondi, Koya, Kolami, Chenchu, and Lambadi.