Looks really cool, exciting to see. I have two questions around this:
1. Given that you are concerned with providing access a class of folks that are traditionally ignored by technologists, do you plan to make these models usable for offline purposes? For example an illiterate person I know from Uttarkhand: his home village is not connected to road. Interestingly he does speak Hindi, but his native language I believe is something more obscure. To get home, he walks five hours from the terminus of a road. Connectivity is obviously both limited and intermittent. A usable device might want the voice interface embedded on it. Any plans for this?
2. I have minimal understanding of this but as someone who has learned Hindi/Urdu as a foreign language but in the US, I am often in mixed conversation w/ both Indians and Pakistanis. There never seems to be any issues with communication. I have heard that certain terms (like for example "khub suraat", "shukria", "kitaab") are more Urdu than Hindi. I also studied Arabic, Farsi, and Swahili so I am familiar with these as loanwords Arabic and/or Persian, but in practice I hear Hindi speakers using these terms often. Is the primary value add here political? Is it an accent thing? Thanks in advance for any explanation. This is still very much a mystery to me.
To increase access we’re also exploring telco hotlines. Carrier penetration is much higher than internet, so this could let people use AI through a simple phone call. Some users already pay for similar services like weather updates (for farmers) via SIM balance. But to scale it will likely require government or telco partnerships.
1. Offline models: Yes that is on the roadmap.
There is a big demand for them especially in interactive educational use-cases.
2. Urdu and Modern Hindi can be cross understood in spoken form. The authentic Hindi is much different though and I can't understand the press releases that are done in super authentic Hindi.
The writing systems in Urdu and Hindi is completely different too, so even if there is a great TTS system in Hindi, I cant use it. Accent are very different too.
1. Given that you are concerned with providing access a class of folks that are traditionally ignored by technologists, do you plan to make these models usable for offline purposes? For example an illiterate person I know from Uttarkhand: his home village is not connected to road. Interestingly he does speak Hindi, but his native language I believe is something more obscure. To get home, he walks five hours from the terminus of a road. Connectivity is obviously both limited and intermittent. A usable device might want the voice interface embedded on it. Any plans for this?
2. I have minimal understanding of this but as someone who has learned Hindi/Urdu as a foreign language but in the US, I am often in mixed conversation w/ both Indians and Pakistanis. There never seems to be any issues with communication. I have heard that certain terms (like for example "khub suraat", "shukria", "kitaab") are more Urdu than Hindi. I also studied Arabic, Farsi, and Swahili so I am familiar with these as loanwords Arabic and/or Persian, but in practice I hear Hindi speakers using these terms often. Is the primary value add here political? Is it an accent thing? Thanks in advance for any explanation. This is still very much a mystery to me.