Indian Ministry of Culture to Utilize AI for Digitization and Preservation of Ancient Manuscripts
The Indian Ministry of Culture is set to implement artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies to decipher, digitize, and preserve over one crore ancient manuscripts. This initiative, part of the flagship Gyan Bharatam program, aims to create a National Digital Repository (NDR) of these historical documents. The NDR will allow users to access the preserved manuscripts through both text and voice-based queries. A key feature of this AI-powered platform will be a 'Talk-to-Manuscript' facility, enabling researchers and other users to pose questions directly to individual manuscripts and specific knowledge domains. The ministry plans to engage an expert technology firm to develop this platform, which will employ advanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) to convert manuscripts into searchable digital texts while maintaining their original structure, including headings, marginal notes, and illustrations. The AI will also transcribe handwritten tex...
