This ‘AI grandma’ conjures children’s tales in Telugu | Hyderabad News

HYDERABAD: A team of Artificial Intelligence experts sitting in Hyderabad were not impressed when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman visited India in June last year and said an Indian start-up would not be able to replicate ChatGPT, at least on a foundational level. Instead of adding to the raging controversy on ‘X’ immediately after his comments, they decided to build something.

A little more than six months later we have the AI platform Chandamama Kathalu (Chandamama stories).You can call it ‘digital Dadi’ that can conjure up and narrate stories to children in Telugu. Of course, Chandamama Kathalu is not ChatGPT-II, but those who built it believe this is only the start. They are keen on building more complex platforms in the future.
The team of techies worked with 10,000 students across engineering colleges from the city for the first time in the country to build the platform.
Digital dadi first regional AI platform: Developers
The platform can generate little nuggets – five to 10 lines long – on ethics and good conduct while responding to specific prompts. According to the team, this is the first ever regional (Telugu) AI platform with about 200 prompts for now.
City-based organisation Swecha, working with the motive of democratising technology and bridging the digital divide with open free source architecture, helped build the platform with just 50,000.
Praveen Chandrahas, secretary of Swecha, told STOI, “We need a large data bank to come up with any new initiative using an AI platform. We have fed 40,000 Telugu children’s stories available online as base data for AI to work on. When we type, for example, Anaganaga oka raju (Ek tha raja), one of the prompts we have developed, it will generate the shortest story quickly. The prompt is something like a question or search word put in Google or ChatGPT. We can build more prompts in the future.”
City-based tech company Ozonetel provided the support for the entire exercise. “We believe that technology’s best purpose is to be able to use it for all sections of society irrespective of language, gender, class,” Chaitanya Chokkareddy, co-founder of Ozonetel, said.
“We want to broaden this initiative. We can feed any Indian epic or folk story for children to the platform and AI can come up with a completely new story of its own.”
The developers say that they have deliberately used Telugu as many believe English is preferred over regional languages and the younger generation is losing touch with its mother tongue. “Everyone who worked on the project was well-versed in Telugu and worked without charging a penny,” Naveen Cherukupally, a young techie and student charter in-charge of Swecha, said.
Lauding the platform, IT and industries principal secretary, Jayesh Ranjan, said “Developments that mark the convergence of technology, culture, and innovation can bring significant global impact. With Telugu being a widely spoken language, there is a dire need for a local language model that can spawn numerous societal innovations. Chandamama Kathalu is one such innovation.”