Bengaluru, Aug. 17 -- At Google's annual I/O Connect event in Bengaluru this July, the spotlight was on India's AI ambitions. With over 1,800 developers in attendance, the recurring theme echoing across various panel discussions, product announcements and workshops was that of building AI capability for India's linguistic diversity.

With 22 official languages and hundreds of spoken dialects, India faces a monumental challenge in building AI systems that can work across this multilingual landscape.

In the demo area of the event, this challenge was front and centre, with startups showcasing how they're tackling it. Among those were Sarvam AI, demonstrating Sarvam-Translate, a multilingual model fine-tuned on Google's open-source large lan...