Rahul gives unsolicited advice

This article on Baidu and it's bet on AI sparked a thought in my head. Well, the thought was to basically copy what Baidu is doing in China and do the same in India. I wrote earlier on the language barrier in India and how AI can help solve the problem. The crux of what Baidu is doing in China is to employ a bunch of people to translate English technical documents to Chinese (Mandarin prolly). By doing so, not only is the industry able to communicate with Chinese customers better, Baidu now has a big database of English-Chinese (Mandarin) translations. Don't you think doing the same with Indian languages would be awesome? Instead of hackathons and docathons, we could have translate-athons (?) where volunteers could translate documents into the numerous Indian languages and in the process, help in compiling an impressive English-Indian language dataset, a dataset that can now be used to train AI to better translate between English and Indian languages and maybe even betwe...

Natively, I speak Telugu. I've learnt to speak Hindi and English. I currently live in a city, where most speak Marathi. I used to live in a city where most spoke Tamil. And I'm not atypical. Most Indians cross state lines over the course of their lives, for work or other reasons. And the language barrier is the biggest problem while doing so. Personally, even though I lived in Chennai for over 6 years, I still can't speak or understand Tamil and Marathi might as well be Arabic to me, even after living in Pune for just over an year. (I'm clearly not trying hard enough to learn the language.) Unlike me, most people who stay for a long (1+ year) at a location learn the local language, because it makes day-to-day life easier. But what about travelers? What about those who stay for a short period of time? What about those not educated in a common language? You can argue that a majority of Indians can speak and understand Hindi. Actually, No. And no, the majority of India...