BHASHINI Partners with NHA to Deploy Multilingual Voice-Enabled AI across Ayushman Bharat Platforms

The partnership seeks to ensure that citizens can interact with digital health services in their preferred language, improving usability, engagement, and trust.

India has taken a significant step toward inclusive digital healthcare as the National Health Authority and Digital India BHASHINI have formalised a partnership to embed multilingual, voice-enabled AI across Ayushman Bharat digital health platforms.

The Memorandum of Understanding was exchanged during a national review meeting of Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana and the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, held in Bhubaneswar, Odisha.

BHASHINI, developed under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, serves as India’s national language AI platform and supports translation and conversational AI across 22 scheduled languages, along with several non-scheduled languages and dialects.

By embedding these AI capabilities into Ayushman Bharat platforms, the partnership seeks to ensure that citizens can interact with digital health services in their preferred language, improving usability, engagement, and trust.

Amitabh Nag, CEO of the Digital India BHASHINI Division, said, “As digital health platforms scale nationwide, AI adoption becomes a natural progression. In a linguistically diverse country like India, AI must be multilingual and voice-enabled so that language does not become a barrier to accessing healthcare,” he said.

He added that language AI can enhance citizen engagement, grievance redressal, clinical documentation, and overall platform usability.

Operational benefits were also highlighted by Kiran Gopal Vaska, Joint Secretary, Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, who pointed to the role of AI tools in easing the workload of healthcare professionals.

He said AI-enabled voice-to-text and natural language processing can help doctors manage time constraints, improve patient-doctor communication, and support the automatic generation of electronic health records, strengthening efficiency across the health system.

Under the MoU, BHASHINI will support secure and responsible deployment of multilingual AI, with a focus on data governance, system security, and continuous improvement of AI models through real-world usage and feedback.

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