BHASHINI
India's government platform for AI translation and speech in Indian languages
Overview
BHASHINI is the Indian government's National Language Translation Mission platform, offering 350+ AI models for translation, speech recognition, text-to-speech and OCR across 36 Indian text and 23 voice languages, powering 800+ government websites. Free APIs for proof of concept; production pricing on request.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 1 Oct 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
- API access for proof-of-concept use only
- Contact the Bhashini team for pricing plans
What you can produce with BHASHINI
- Machine translation across Indian languages
- Speech recognition and text-to-speech
- Transliteration and OCR
- Anuvaad app and Lekhaanuvaad document translation
- Website translation plugin
- BhashaDaan crowdsourced language data
BHASHINI is a serious public investment in Indian-language AI, with broad language coverage and real deployments across government services, from grievance redress to Aadhaar and railway enquiries. Its APIs are free only for proof-of-concept work, production pricing is by request, and its developer documentation is dated. Be careful with a similarly named private company at bhashini.ai, which is unrelated. The natural choice for Indian public-sector and enterprise projects needing Indian-language translation and speech; elsewhere, commercial providers are easier to adopt.
What we found
BHASHINI is the Indian government's national language-technology platform, launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Digital India Week in Gandhinagar in July 2022 and run by the Digital India BHASHINI Division of the Digital India Corporation, under the Ministry of Electronics and IT. It offers more than 350 AI models and over 20 language services — speech recognition, machine translation, text-to-speech, transliteration, OCR, voice cloning, speaker and language diarisation, named-entity recognition, a profanity filter and language detection — built largely by Indian research institutions including the IITs, IIITs and C-DAC. According to the government it covers 36 Indian languages for text, 23 for voice and 35 international languages, powers more than 800 government websites and handles more than 20 million AI inferences a day, with over 8 billion in total.
Its public products include the Anuvaad translation app, Lekhaanuvaad document translation, a website-translation plugin and BhashaDaan, a crowdsourcing effort to collect language data. Deployments include the CPGRAMS public-grievance system, which translates text in 22 languages and voice in 16, the My Aadhaar portal, the National Train Enquiry System and Indian Railways' AskDisha assistant. Parts of the platform are open source on GitHub under the MIT licence, and Amitabh Nag is chief executive.
APIs are free for proof-of-concept work once an organisation has registered and been approved; production or commercial use needs a paid agreement, with pricing on request. A private company, Bhashini AI Solutions, sells unrelated subscription plans at bhashini.ai and states that it is not affiliated with the government platform, so its prices do not apply here. BHASHINI's public API documentation was last updated more than a year ago.
For Indian government bodies and companies building services in Indian languages it is the natural starting point; it is less relevant outside India.
Compiled by RECATOOLS from public sources: vendor documentation and pricing, code repositories and published reporting.
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including BHASHINI's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with BHASHINI unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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