Artificial intelligence is truly affecting the world. The industry is about more than companies vying for dominance in the whole new world of generative AI. Large technology companies like Microsoft are also working to develop tools that enable start-ups working for public welfare.
From creating tools that can help scientists manage and evaluate data to AI that can teach students to AI assistants in hospitals to help healthcare professionals manage patients effectively, MicrosoftAI innovation appears to be the backbone of these new age start-ups and their unique initiatives.
During the Microsoft AI Tour organized in Bengaluru, with the Insightful speech from CEO Satya Nadella, the company also demonstrated its AI capabilities in action. As part of the event, three companies that have used Microsoft’s AI services for groundbreaking innovations in the social sector showcased new possibilities for India.
An LLM that can converse in your language
Microsoft is supporting the development of a voice-based generative AI application through its partnership with AI startup Sarvam AI. The company is working to make its Indic Voice Large Language Model (LLM) available on Azure.
Sarvam AI builds generative AI models with Indian languages based on local contexts. Through this, the company aims to make the development and deployment of generative AI tools across India more accessible and cost-effective for a variety of use cases.
The start-up’s LLM Indic Voice is intended to provide a natural voice interface to LLMs currently in Hindi. The company plans to cover more Indian languages while supporting colloquial usage. During the demo session, the company presented a video of a young student reluctant to follow her routine studies. The student then discovers a Gen AI tool called Tuition Anna, which helps her learn in a language that suits her.
“We are mainly trying to build the Indic LLM layer that supports Indian languages and do it efficiently. One of the questions we are asked is how India will use this technology and whether it should be a voice interface, which means it should be conversational first, real-time and voice-based. We generally tend to mix Hindi and English, it should work on mobile devices,” said Dr Pratyush Kumar, one of the co-founders of the start-up.
The Sarvam AI demo showed the incredible potential of Indic LLM, which can be instrumental in a multitude of use cases for India.
Helping scientists and researchers
Indian multinational technology services company Persistent Systems leverages the power of Azure OpenAI and Microsoft’s Github Copilot. The company, in partnership with Microsoft, recently released a cutting-edge generative AI-based population health management solution. It focuses on the social determinants of health, helping to predict costs of care and address non-clinical patient needs. Innovation facilitates the delivery of quality care in a timely manner, optimizing resources and profitability for healthcare entities.
“We have 27 million cancer patients and more than 70 million diabetic patients, and this number is increasing. So we urgently need to focus on this population and how they can be uniquely treated. We are a technology partner of some industry associations who are trying to create datasets, collect data, digitize it, and then enable it on a digital platform so that researchers in the Indian population can access it easily” , Pandurang said. Kamat, chief technology officer at Persistent Systems.
According to Shreekanth Joshi, vice president of Persistent, the company has developed a platform to bring all the data together using Azure Cloud and Azure Infrastructure Data Services. The idea is to allow researchers to integrate all of this patient data into the platform to determine what type of therapy is possible.
“Indian data exists in silos, not collated. Finding cancer therapies starts with genomic data, which is the largest and most complex source. We developed a platform using Azure to allow researchers to bring together patient data to determine possible therapies,” Joshi said during the demonstration.
AI, a boon for health
One of the highlights of the demo sessions was the 10bedICU program, an initiative by Srikanth Nadhamuni with support from the Open Healthcare Network (OHC). OHC is an open source community that strives to provide healthcare in resource-limited settings. The 10BedICU program created intensive care units in public hospitals in small towns during Covid using the CARE platform. More than 200 10-bed intensive care units are now operating across India, enabling specialist support and saving more than 15,000 lives.
Nadhamuni, former head of technology at the UID Authority of India, said OHC is among the most active open source communities in India. “The 10-bed ICU creates ICUs in rural public hospitals. I started this during the Covid delta wave. We are equipping public hospitals at the sub-district level, which mostly lack intensive care units. It cost us around Rs 50 lakh to create a 10-bed intensive care unit with state-of-the-art equipment. We deployed our CARE software platform to over 400 OHC volunteers using GitHub Copilot,” said Nadhamuni, adding that Microsoft’s AI services helped their cause immensely.
Nadhamuni also demonstrated the TeleICU, which he said was a complete game changer. The TeleICU allows medical school doctors to help patients through their cloud network. “We are present in more than 200 hospitals in nine states. In two years, we have covered around 23 percent of Indian districts. We intend to cover every district in the country with critical care support,” Nadhamuni said.
Developer demos shown during the Microsoft AI Tour only scratched the surface of AI’s vast potential to improve societal well-being. The startups and initiatives presented further highlighted Nadella’s vision of fostering equitable AI for the common good.
