Episode 02 - (Not so) Lost in Translation

Imagine a construction worker from Odisha going to Bangalore to find work. Or a citizen from interior Nagaland trying to interact with the state government. Language is a barrier to both these people and it can make livelihoods rather challenging. But current research in AI – from deep neural networks to massive multi-lingual models – are already trying to solve this problem. 

Credits: 
Narration: Harsha Bhogle
Executive Producer: Gaurav Vaz
Producer: Archana Nathan
Research, Interviews and Scripts: Vinay Aravind
Narrative overview: Charu Sharma and Shriram Parthasarathy
Title track, sound design and background score: Nikhil Rao and Abhijit Nath. 

All clips and voices used in this podcast are owned by the original creators We thank wholeheartedly all our guests who appeared on this episode 

• Dr. Shobha Satyanath, a professor of linguistics at Delhi University 
• Kalika Bali, Principal Researcher, Microsoft India 
• Dr. Monojit Chowdhury, Principal Data and Applied Scientist with Turing 
• Dr. Vivek Seshadri, a researcher at Microsoft India. 

Links to clips used in the episode and citations: 

• The Language Barrier Plaguing India's Stock Market | Mint (livemint.com) 
• Jawaharlal Nehru’s Tryst with Destiny speech
• 780 Indian languages surveyed and documented by PLSI, next aim to document 6000 world languages | India News The Indian Express 
• List of the 122 census recognised languages of India, including Scheduled and Non-Scheduled Languages 
• Prof. G.N. Devy: 'All our languages are losing linguistic prowess' - Frontline (thehindu.com) 
• Deep Learning Neural Networks Explained in Plain English (freecodecamp.org) 
• Artificial Intelligence wrote this entire video. Are you scared yet, human? 
• Project Karya - Microsoft Research 
• ELLORA: Enabling Low Resource Languages - Microsoft Research 
• Microsoft Turing Universal Language Representation model, T-ULRv5, tops XTREME leaderboard and trains 100x faster - Microsoft Research 
• CGNet Swara’s website
• Cognitive Services—APIs for AI Solutions | Microsoft Azure