Parliament using AI, ML to make available proceedings in different languages: LS Speaker

New Delhi: Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla on Tuesday said artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies were put to use to make available House proceedings in different regional languages to members of Parliament.

Addressing a press conference here after the two-day meeting of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association India Region, Birla said the Lok Sabha Secretariat was also sharing its expertise in technology with legislatures of states and Union territories to speed up the process of digitisation.

Birla said during the two-day conference, presiding officers of state legislatures from across the country also deliberated on the agenda of the upcoming 67th Commonwealth Parliamentary Conference (CPC) in Sydney from November 3-8.

The CPC has short-listed eight topics including support of legislatures to promote LGBTQ+ participation, use of artificial learning (AI) in parliamentary proceedings, violence and abuse of parliamentarians, human trafficking, refugees and immigration across commonwealth nations for deliberation by participants.

Birla said the legislative bodies were digitising processes and records and taking measures to train public representatives using information technology in day-to-day activities.

“The state legislatures should enhance the pace of digitisation, wherever lagging behind, so that the vision of ‘one nation, one digital platform’ could be realised,” he said.

He also assured that the issues raised by the presiding officers such as financial autonomy and decreasing number of sittings of the Houses will be discussed and acceptable solutions will be found.

Parliament officials said artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) technologies were being used by the Lok Sabha secretariat to make available House proceedings to lawmakers in different Indian languages.

They said a glossary of terms and their meaning in the context of parliamentary procedures was being compiled for use in making available the list of business and related parliamentary papers in 10 different languages to the parliamentarians.

The officials said artificial intelligence was being used to catalogue over 10,000 hours of audio visual recordings of Lok Sabha proceedings and 8,000 hours of Rajya Sabha debates, dating back to 1992, to enable easy and accurate access to users.

“For example, if you want to know what (former prime minister) Atal Bihari Vajpayee had said on primary education, the search results would throw up video clips on the precise topic in different speeches. A user can access the desired portion instead of listening to the entire speech,” the officials said.

On the ‘one nation, one platform’, the officials said debates of different legislative assemblies and councils will be made available on the ‘Digital Sansad’ portal.