RAISE 2020, the global virtual summit on AI hosted by the Government of India, was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on October 5. One of the key highlights of the inaugural event was the participation of eminent AI researcher and Turing Award winner Dr. Raj Reddy. 

In his keynote at the event inaugural event, Dr. Reddy highlighted how connected devices and sensors, along with AI, will make possible many of the things today, which we weren't even able to think 50 years ago. 

Being one of the world's most authoritative expert in speech recognition systems, Reddy pointed out how NLP and speech translations are currently transforming millions of lives. 

Reddy also pointed out that AI technologies can finally bridge the language divide in the country. 

"The speech to speech translation technology can be used to overcome India's language divide,'" he said. "For this, we need 100,000 hours of speech and 100 million words of text for each language," he added. 

"Using spoken language assistants, people at the bottom of the pyramid who cannot read will be able to shop online, pays bill online, bank online, watch videos in any language for entertainment and education online and access free information from diverse sources online," said Professor Reddy. 

In order to accomplish this, Reddy believes we need to encourage industry to develop Indian language Alexas and task-specific spoken language apps. 

To realise these aspirations, there are some prerequisites that needed to be met according to Reddy. The first two prerequisites include a connected population that is trained in digital literacy and fibre connection with unlimited capacity. 

Finally, a strong collaboration between the government, industry and academia to create the necessary Indian language datasets, translations systems and dialogue apps is also necessary if we are to bridge the language barrier, Reddy noted.