Sitting in the shade of a coconut palm, a 30-year-old school teacher named Chandrika in Karnataka’s village Alahalli had just Rs 184 in her bank account before she started using an app in which the sound of her voice speaking in her mother tongue can be heard.
But just a few months ago, in return for around six hours of work spread over several days in late April, she received Rs 2,570. And for many rural Indians like her, an Indian startup’s app is no less than a revolution.
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How An App Is Transforming Village People’s Lives
time
Unlike her teaching job, which gives her nearly the same salary at the end of the month, the app doesn’t make Chandrika wait that long. The money lands in her bank account in just a few hours after her work is done. By just reading text aloud in her native language of Kannada, spoken by around 60 million people mostly in central and southern India, Chandrika has used this app to earn an hourly wage of about Rs 400. And in a few days, more money will arrive—a 50% bonus, awarded once the voice clips are validated as accurate, as per the TIME report.
All thanks to artificial intelligence, Chandrika’s voice can fetch this money. As AI tools such as ChatGPT currently work best in languages like English, they work much less well in languages like Kannada, which is spoken by millions of people.
This has created huge demand for datasets—collections of text or voice data—in languages spoken by some of the poorest people in the world. Part of that demand comes from tech companies seeking to build out their AI tools. Another big chunk comes from academia and governments, especially in India, where English and Hindi have long held outsize precedence in a nation of some 1.4 billion people with 22 official languages and at least 780 more indigenous ones. This rising demand means that hundreds of millions of Indians are suddenly in control of a scarce and newly valuable asset: their mother tongue.
Indian AI Startup Helping The Poor
karya
To solve this, one Indian startup is testing a new model in the villages, for which Chandrika works too. It is for Karya, a non-profit startup launched in 2021 in Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore) that bills itself as “the world’s first ethical data company.” The startup Karya already has a list of high-profile clients, including Microsoft, MIT, and Stanford.
While it sells data to big tech companies and other clients at the market rate just like its competitors, instead of keeping much of that cash as profit, it covers its costs and funnels the rest towards the rural poor in India.
(Karya partners with local NGOs to ensure access to its jobs goes first to the poorest of the poor, as well as historically marginalised communities.) In addition to its $5 hourly minimum, Karya gives workers de facto ownership of the data they create on the job, so whenever it is resold, the workers receive the proceeds on top of their past wages. It’s a model that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the industry.
The work Karya is doing also means that millions of people whose languages are marginalised online could stand to gain better access to the benefits of technology—including AI. “Most people in the villages don’t know English,” says Vinutha, a 23-year-old student who has used Karya to reduce her financial reliance on her parents. “If a computer could understand Kannada, that would be very helpful.”
“The wages that exist right now are a failure of the market,” Manu Chopra, the 27-year-old CEO of Karya, said, as per a TIME report.
“We decided to be a nonprofit because, fundamentally, you can’t solve a market failure in the market.”The catch, if you can call it that, is that the work is supplementary. The first thing Karya tells its workers is: This is not a permanent job, but rather a way to quickly get an income boost that will allow you to go on and do other things. The maximum a worker can earn through the app is the equivalent of $1,500 (about Rs 1.2 lakh), roughly the average annual income in India.
After that point, they make way for somebody else.
Also Read: TCS Confirms Plan To Build Its Own ChatGPT Like AI Tool
Already Helped 30,000 Rural Indians Earn Rs 65 Million
indiatimes
Startup Karya says it has paid out Rs 65 million in wages to some 30,000 rural Indians up and down the country. By 2030, Chopra wants it to reach 100 million. “I genuinely feel this is the quickest way to move millions of people out of poverty if done right,” says Chopra, who was born into poverty and won a scholarship to Stanford that changed his trajectory. “This is absolutely a social project. Wealth is power. And we want to redistribute wealth to the communities that have been left behind.”
Also, just 70 miles from the bustling tech metropolis of Bengaluru, is the village of Chilukavadi. Inside a low concrete building, the headquarters of a local farming cooperative, a dozen men and women are gathered—all of whom have started working for Karya within the past week.
Kanakaraj S., a skinny 21-year-old, sits cross-legged on the cool concrete floor. He is studying at a nearby college, and to pay for books and transport costs, he occasionally works as a casual labourer in the surrounding fields. A day’s work can earn him Rs 350, but this kind of manual labour is becoming more unbearable as climate change makes summers here even more sweltering than usual. Working in a factory in a nearby city would mean a slightly higher wage, but it would also mean hours of daily commuting on unreliable and expensive buses or, worse, moving away from his support network to live in dormitory accommodation in the city.
At Karya, Kanakaraj can earn more in an hour than he makes in a day in the fields. “The work is good,” he says. “And easy.” Chopra says that’s a typical refrain when he meets villagers.
“They’re happy we pay them well,” he says, but more importantly, “it’s that it’s not hard work. It’s not physical work.” Kanakaraj was surprised when he saw the first payment land in his bank account. “We’ve lost a lot of money from scams,” he said, explaining that it is common for villagers to receive SMS texts preying on their desperation, offering to multiply any deposits they make by 10. When somebody first told him about Karya, he assumed it was a similar con—a common initial response, according to Chopra.
A Microsoft Researcher Is A Member Of The Startup
time
“The hope is that efforts like the ones Karya is enabling will help Indian-language AI projects learn from the mistakes of English AIs and begin from a far more reliable and unbiased starting point, the TIME report mentioned.
“Until not so long ago, a speech-recognition engine for English would not even understand my English,” says Kalika Bali, a linguist and principal researcher at Microsoft Research who is working with the Gates Foundation on the project and is an unpaid member of Karya’s oversight board, referring to her accent. “What is the point of AI technologies being out there if they do not cater to the users they are targeting?”
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