Parliament takes to AI to revive lost speeches of House veterans

Lost speeches of great leaders and parliamentarians will soon witness a revival, with the Parliament deploying AI and Machine Learning tools to bring to people exactly what they wish to see and hear from their favourite MPs.

Be it late Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s passionate defence of Pokhran 2 in Lok Sabha on May 29, 1998; IK Gujral’s justification for retraction of the controversial Insurance Regulatory Development Authority Bill on August 6, 1997; Manmohan Singh’s remarks on the 60th anniversary of the first sitting of Lok Sabha on May 13, 2012; or PV Narasimha Rao’s rationale behind enhancing monthly pensions of freedom fighters and their widows from Rs 750 to Rs 1000 on August 12, 1992 — audio visual recordings of all House greats and other MPs will soon be hosted on Digital Sansad platform for common citizens to access.

The Lok Sabha secretariat, in association with the National Informatics Centre and private experts, has embarked on a mission to catalogue a whopping 18,000 hours of AV (audio visual) recordings of both houses of Parliament starting 1992.

It was in that year that the audio visual recording of proceedings began. Records of years prior to that are only available in the form of debates. LS Secretary General Uptal Kumar Singh today told The Tribune that the project would earn the Parliament a pride of place among national parliaments across the world for the sheer nature of pioneering elements the project involved.

“The plan is to catalogue all 10,000 hours of AV recordings of Lok Sabha proceedings available to us from 1992 until today and 8,000 hours of Rajya Sabha recordings. The project would be complete by the end of the year. So if you wish to see and hear PM AB Vajpayee on primary education, all you need to do is type the key words and AI and ML enabled tools will take you exactly to each reference ever made on primary education by the leader. You would not need to hear or see the entire speech, which could be very long,” said Singh.

The catalogue will also help access the exact duration of the speech when the remarks being searched were made, he added. “Likewise, you can hear and see George Fernandes’ speeches on labour reforms and anything else you wish to hear or see about any other parliamentarian,” said Singh.

In a parallel project, the Parliament is also creating a glossary of thousands of words to make the list of daily business of both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha available in all scheduled Indian languages. Presently, this list is available only in Hindi and English.