Hyderabad: The very mention of Chandamama will take people from earlier generations on a nostalgic trip and help them relive the good old days of comics and magazines for children.
In their bid to bring alive the moral and ethical values embedded in ‘Chandamama Kathalu’, an NGO, ‘Swecha,’ along with likeminded people, has come up with ‘AI Chandamama Kathalu’ for the benefit of the young and future generations.
At the launch of the AI storytelling version, Kiran Chandra, who conceptualised this project, explained, “The goal is to revive the values we learnt reading Chandamama during our growing up years. Nothing can be better than presenting them as an AI product so that youngsters can take a fancy for it. Thousands took part in the Telugu AI initiative by contributing their time and effort.”
He added “The stories available in scanned PDFs had to be digitised first. Normally, this would have taken months, but, thanks to the active involvement of the entire Swecha community, 10,000 students and faculty across 30 engineering colleges, we converted Telugu text from old magazines in four hours flat. The AI version carries 40,000 stories. The dataset has been released for the public and is available on the internet for downloading. This effort took me back by 20 years and reminded me of the toil put in then to create the first Telugu operating system, font and glossary, he said.
“This seems a logical forward step in our tech-driven journey. We shall continue to take up more such works in this space,” Kiran Chandra said.
