SEBI partners BHASHINI to deploy language AI across securities market services

Agreement gives the market regulator access to speech recognition, text-to-speech, machine translation and OCR tools, while helping BHASHINI improve its language models with securities market terminology.

Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), the statutory regulator for the securities and commodity markets in India, has signed an MoU with the Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD) to use language technology services and tools to make its services accessible in regional languages.

Under the agreement, SEBI will access BHASHINI's language translation APIs, models and tools, including automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech, machine translation and optical character recognition (OCR).

The collaboration will also help enhance BHASHINI's language models with securities market-related terminology, enabling them to handle specialised financial and market-related content.

It is important for technology service providers and system integrators to understand the role of language technology in extending digital services across India's linguistic markets.

However, SEBI has not disclosed any implementation partners, technology vendors or commercial opportunities linked to the MoU.

SEBI whole-time member Sandip Pradhan and DIBD chief executive officer Amitabh Nag signed the agreement in the presence of senior officials from both organisations. The MoU came into force on Tuesday.

The agreement covers four key language technology capabilities. Automatic speech recognition converts spoken language into text, while text-to-speech converts written content into spoken output.

Machine translation supports translation between languages, and OCR extracts text from scanned documents and images.

An important part of the collaboration is the enhancement of BHASHINI's language models with securities market terminology.

This is relevant because financial and securities market content uses specialised terms that require domain-specific language understanding for accurate translation and communication.

The agreement could support SEBI's efforts to make information and services accessible to people who prefer regional languages. However, the regulator has not specified which services will use these technologies first or which languages will be prioritised.

BHASHINI's role in digital language services

The Digital India BHASHINI Division functions as an independent division under the Digital India Corporation, a Section 8 not-for-profit company established by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

BHASHINI provides language technology infrastructure, including APIs, models and tools that support Indian languages.

Through this agreement, SEBI will be able to use these capabilities for its regional-language requirements while contributing securities market terminology to the language models.

The announcement does not specify an implementation timeline, project cost or plans for new investor-facing applications using the technology.