RCTS collaborates with Agastya Foundation, AI to aid rural school kids in accessing science information

A multi-partner project, Ask Agastya project spearheaded by the Raj Reddy Centre for
Technology and Society (RCTS) in collaboration with Agastya Foundation, an NGO, aims to supplement high school Science instruction in regional languages via an AI solution that operates in the absence of the internet.
Ramesh Loganathan, Professor of Practice and Co-Innovations, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIITH), said, “They started a telephone-based voice call service for students where students could dial a number and ask questions to a teacher.
Around a year ago, they approached us and asked if we could automate it using AI.”
Sastry Adiraju, CTO, Agastya Foundation, says, “Our target beneficiaries don’t necessarily have access to the Internet and a smartphone or a laptop or any such device.
Hence, the proposal was to enable them to put across their questions through the minimum available medium like a voice phone, either a mobile or even a landline. Essentially, the driving force is that limited resources should not disadvantage a child.”
While urban school children can immediately reach out to the Internet to clarify their doubts, its not the same case for rural children. Dr Arjun Rajasekar, Senior Research Scientist, RCTS, said,
“With AskAgastya, we are giving these children an opportunity to clear their doubts
immediately, without having to wait for the next day of school so that their motivation to
learn is not hampered.”
The project has seen the combined efforts of IIITH’s language technologies expertise in conjunction with IIT Madras providing a text-to-speech conversion as well as a Hyderabad-based start-up, Subtl.ai assisting with a Doc AI solution. The AI-driven IVR system kicks in with the student’s question.
The audio is recorded and goes through a Speech Recognition Module developed by the Speech Processing Lab of the Language Technologies Research Centre (LTRC) where it gets extracted by AI into Telugu text. The text then undergoes a translation into the English language with the help of the machine translation and NLP Lab.