Google grants $1mn to data collection and annotation platform Karya

Data design and collection platform Karya has been awarded a $1 million grant from Google.org, Google’s philanthropic branch. This funding will enable Karya, a self-described "data cooperative," to support tens of thousands of individuals from lower-income communities by offering AI-related economic opportunities. These opportunities include a range of tasks, such as data annotation and providing feedback to enhance the performance of AI models in local languages.

Karya will be using the grant money to design a research-based curriculum and an experience-focused rubric in 10 major Indic languages. Additionally, Karya will build a GenAI-based multilingual chatbot to provide real-time support for its app and web-based work platforms that provide access to AI-related digital tasks.

To build the multilingual chatbot, Karya will be conducting experience research by making its digital work platform accessible to partner organizations based in Africa, before scaling it globally. Already, an early prototype of the chatbot is deployed in Ethiopia to create  AI-related tasks in local languages, including Amharic. Going forward, Karya plans to make its skilling material and chatbot development manual available to developers, technologists, non-profits, worker collectives, and government bodies to create even more solutions.

In the last two years, the company has claimed to have enabled 50,000 people in rural India, half of them from marginalized communities to access high-paying data annotation work. With the proposed digital skilling pathway and multilingual chatbot, Karya aims to reach 100,000 people.

“At Karya, we believe that low-income communities around the world are not only excellent beneficiaries of AI, but they are also excellent builders of AI. We want to use AI to bring earning and learning opportunities to low-income communities across the Global South,” said Karya co-founder and CEO Manu Chopra.
 
“From building speech datasets in local Indic languages and evaluating LLM performance to annotating text, image and video datasets, Karya’s workers enable cutting-edge AI innovations across the world.  Our workers can access these meaningful digital work opportunities through their smartphones, earning 20 times the local minimum wage while building skills and transforming their futures.”