BENGALURU: Bengaluru Police on Wednesday introduced an AI-powered multilingual feature in its Namma 112 emergency helpline (police control room), becoming the first police unit in the country to deploy such a system.The new initiative removes language barriers by supporting over 10 Indian and foreign languages, including Bengali, Malayalam, Gujarati, Odia, Manipuri, Assamese, Kashmiri, Nepali, as well as French, Spanish, and Arabic. Most in the police force are already familiar with Kannada, English, Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu.Developed in collaboration with Monday Ventures and Aeos, the system utilises multilingual Voice AI for Nationwide Key Interventions (VANKI) for communication in multiple languages.
More lingos soon: HMLaunching the project, home minister G Parameshwara said more languages will be introduced soon.“Ours is an internationally renowned city and people from across the globe visit us. Language was an issue for those seeking help from police, particularly the control room. Now, we are the first police force in the country to interact in more than 10 languages,” he said.Police commissioner Seemanth Kumar Singh said officers in Bengaluru can speak and understand Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Hindi. “The challenge is when people call us during an emergency and speak a language, Indian or foreign, that we are not familiar with. So we began collecting data on the languages people generally speak in while calling the helpline.”The data collection started in Jan this year, said joint commissioner of police (admin) Kuldeep Kumar Jain. “The police control room receives around 8,000 phone calls daily, of which around 2,000 require action. Of these 2,000 calls, 100-200 people speak in other languages. Malayalam was the most requested, followed by other regional languages, while Spanish, French, Nepali and Arabic were the most-sought after foreign languages,” he said.
