Meet the IIT Madras prof named by TIME for making AI speak every official Indian language
As co-founder of AI4Bharat, Khapra leads a mission to bridge language gaps in technology;
Associate Professor Mitesh Khapra of IIT Madras (Photo/X)
CHENNAI: Associate Professor Mitesh Khapra of IIT Madras has earned a place on TIME Magazine’s 2025 list of the “100 most influential people in AI," standing alongside those like Elon Musk, CEO of Telsa and SpaceX, and Sam Altman, the creator of ChatGPT.
As co-founder of AI4Bharat, Khapra leads a mission to bridge language gaps in technology. His team collected thousands of hours of speech data from nearly 500 districts, spanning all 22 official Indian languages, to empower voice-tech startups and government initiatives.
TIME says Khapra’s datasets power nearly every Indian startup working on regional language voice technology. AI4Bharat now supplies around 80% of the datasets used in the government’s Bhashini programme, aimed at delivering digital services in regional languages.
Their open-source models also help the Supreme Court to translate official documents and power a voice bot that lets farmers report subsidy issues in their own language.
"The reason Indian language technology is behind English is because we do not have enough datasets for Indian languages,” Khapra told TIME, a challenge he and his team are tackling head-on.
He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at IIT Madras, affiliated with AI4Bharat and the Integrated Intelligence Laboratory (IIL). His research spans statistical machine translation, text analytics, deep learning, and crowdsourcing.