Guwahati, Feb 18: At India’s first-ever AI Summit held at Bharat Mandapam, which brought together over 20 Heads of State, global technology leaders, policymakers, startups, and academic institutions, two significant initiatives from Assam quietly marked their presence — Digitizing Assam and Borno Labs.
Digitizing Assam 2.0: From Linguistic Heritage to AI-Powered Knowledge Infrastructure
Under the aegis of the Nanda Talukdar Foundation, Digitizing Assam has emerged as one of India’s largest community-driven digital archives of regional language heritage. The initiative has already digitized 2.46 million pages of Assamese literature and preserved over 65,000 Xaasipaat manuscripts. It has built six archival verticals in collaboration with five universities and one IIT. Assam Jatiya Bidyalay and AASU have also actively supported the project and Oil India Limited has sponsored it.
Through formal collaboration with the BharatGen initiative led by IIT Bombay, this vast corpus has now been integrated into a national AI framework. As a result, Assamese language data has become usable for AI-based analysis and future Generative AI model training, creating a high- quality linguistic dataset for research and innovation,according to a Press release.
Additionally, AI-powered OCR technology has converted scanned pages into machine-readable text. Users can now simply type a word and instantly search across the entire archive — a major step toward democratizing access to Assamese knowledge resources.
Speaking on Digitizing Assam 2.0, AI Developer of the project – Kabyaneel Talukdar, CEO of Borno Labs, said:
“With AI-based OCR, we have made 2.46 million pages keyword-searchable. This is not merely digitization; it is about building a digital knowledge foundation for the Assamese language. In the future, this dataset will serve as a core base for Assamese AI development.”
Borno Labs: Building Assamese AI from the Ground Up
Powering this transformation is Borno Labs, a young Assamese startup developing AI tools in Assamese. The team has built speech-to-text AI models, created localized datasets, and helped convert over 2.76 million pages into searchable digital content.
Borno Labs is developing indigenous voice recognition, transcription, and language processing models specifically tailored for Assamese, opening new digital frontiers for regional language technology.
On Borno Labs, Co-founder and CTO Indraneel Talukdar stated:
“Borno Labs is not merely adapting English tools. We are building AI technology for Assamese from the ground up. Our goal is to place regional languages at the center of technological innovation.”
Amid global AI giants, these two Assamese initiatives have sent a clear message — India’s AI future cannot be English alone. It must include regional languages, heritage, and identity.
From Xaasipaat manuscripts to AI-powered search systems, Assam has quietly but firmly entered the algorithmic age.
For more information on the initiative one may contact Kabyaneel Talukdar at his Mobile: +91 7086733737
