A month after acquiring hyperlocal information platform Circle Internet, homegrown social media platform ShareChat is considering tie-ups with IITs and other premier engineering institutions to build Artificial Intelligence (AI) in local Indian languages.

“It is entirely unstructured and, hence, the framework for developing an AI model has no ready reference point. This is unlike Mandarin, which has a reference framework,” Hindu BusinessLine quoted ShareChat’s VP Debdoot Mukherjee as saying.

ShareChat raises $40 million in Pre-Series E round from Pawan Munjal’s family office, Twitter, others.

ShareChat, which has already developed Natural Language Processing (NLP) models in languages such as English and Hindi, is now looking at the Indianised version of the model, added Mukherjee.

Recently, IIT-Madras developed AI models and data sets to process texts in 11 Indian regional languages, which was taken up jointly with AI4Bharat. On a similar note, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology-Delhi (IIIT-D), in collaboration with social enterprise Logically launched a two-year research partnership that will explore the provenance, motivations and psychology of misinformation shared online.

Eyeing at the latest developments, ShareChat is planning to work on building algorithm. ShareChat has reportedly exceeded over 160 million monthly active users (MAUs), with users spending 31 minutes on the platform on a daily basis.

Earlier in August, Sharechat acquired Circle Internet. It has built its own short-video app, called Moj, and has been trying to take advantage of TikTok’s absence from India.