IIT Madras-Incubated Bodhan AI Launches Open AI Models for Indian Languages

Bodhan AI, a Centre of Excellence in AI for Education incubated at IIT Madras, on Friday unveiled a suite of open foundational AI models for Indian languages in collaboration with NVIDIA. The initiative aims to expand access to multilingual technology for education and public-interest applications.

Developed in collaboration with AI4Bharat, the models support four key capabilities: speech recognition through Indic-Transcribe, text-to-speech through Indic-Speak, machine translation through Indic-Translate, and optical character recognition through Indic-OCR.

The initiative will allow developers, startups, universities, researchers, technology companies and government agencies to deploy, adapt and fine-tune the models for Indian-language applications. This includes applications involving regional dialects and accents.

Bodhan AI and AI4Bharat are using NVIDIA’s NeMo framework to train models for automatic speech recognition, machine translation and optical character recognition.

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 ASR has also been post-trained for Indian languages. NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM and vLLM inference microservices are being used to serve the models.

Prof. Mitesh Khapra, Principal Investigator at Bodhan AI and AI4Bharat, said the organisations aim to provide India’s developers and model builders with open models that can be deployed, adapted and fine-tuned according to their requirements.

NVIDIA Senior Distinguished Engineer Niket Agarwal said open models are important for developers building technologies for different languages and communities. The models will be available as open-weight releases as well as through hosted APIs.

Bodhan AI said its educational applications will remain free for learners, educators and partner state governments. Its API infrastructure is also designed to operate within India’s digital ecosystem, supporting large-scale deployment and customisation for Indian languages and local contexts.