IIT Madras Launches Bodhan AI Suite with NVIDIA to Revolutionize Indic Language AI in Education

IIT Madras has launched a suite of open foundational AI models designed specifically for Indic languages, marking a significant step toward strengthening India's multilingual AI ecosystem with a strong focus on education. The initiative, developed in collaboration with NVIDIA and AI4Bharat, brings together four core AI capabilities tailored for Indian languages: speech recognition, text-to-speech conversion, machine translation, and optical character recognition. These models aim to improve how Indian languages are processed, understood, and used in digital systems, particularly in addressing the major gaps in language-based AI tools in India. The models are built to address issues such as automatic speech recognition across regional dialects and accents, natural and accessible text-to-speech conversion in multiple Indian languages, machine translation between Indian languages and global languages, and extracting and digitising printed or handwritten text. The collaboration is designed to accelerate the development and adoption of high-quality multilingual AI systems in India, with a focus on education and open access ecosystem. The use of advanced GPU-accelerated infrastructure strengthens the models' ability to handle large-scale educational and language processing tasks. The initiative is closely aligned with education-focused applications, ensuring that learning tools become more accessible in regional languages. The models are being released as open-weight systems and will also be available through hosted APIs within India's sovereign digital ecosystem. Educational applications built on these models are expected to remain free for learners, teachers, and participating state governments, supporting equitable access to AI-powered education tools. With this launch, IIT Madras aims to strengthen India's position in multilingual AI research while making advanced language technologies more accessible across classrooms, developers, and public digital platforms.