BHASHINI

BHASHINI is the Government of India's free, open AI language platform under MeitY, offering translation, speech-to-text, text-to-speech and transliteration APIs across the country's 22 scheduled languages. It powers language access in many government services and provides open Indic-language datasets for researchers and developers.

BHASHINI is a national digital public infrastructure project for Indian languages, launched in 2022 and implemented by the Digital India Bhashini Division (DIBD) under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). Its goal is to bridge India's language and digital divide by making high-quality language AI available as a public good, so that citizens can access digital services in their own language rather than only in English or Hindi. The platform provides open APIs across the core language-AI tasks: machine translation between Indian languages and English, automatic speech recognition (speech-to-text), text-to-speech in natural-sounding Indian voices, and transliteration between scripts. It is reported to cover all 22 scheduled languages of India, including Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati and others. BHASHINI also curates open language datasets and models, partly through crowdsourcing initiatives, to strengthen Indic-language AI for researchers and developers. Because it is a government platform, BHASHINI is reported to be free to use, and it already underpins language access in a range of public services such as DigiLocker, the UMANG app and Common Service Centres, alongside a reported 100-plus government applications. At the India AI Impact Summit 2026, MeitY reportedly unveiled VoicERA, an open-source voice-AI stack built on BHASHINI's infrastructure. As with any large public system, exact language coverage, model quality and API terms evolve, so confirm current details on the official portal before building on it.