Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) enters a strategic partnership with Meta-the parent company to Facebook-deepen the know-how into the Skills India ecosystem, of cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR). Collaboration in this partnership will enhance the skills and employability of the Indian youth in adapting to the more competitive job market.

Under this partnership, MSDE shall establish five CoEs on VR and MR at the NSTIs in major cities: Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Jodhpur, Chennai, and Kanpur; and it will also introduce AI Assistant specifically designed for the Skill India Mission.

Jayant Chaudhary, Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, said, "Our agenda is to make India's youth self-sustaining through the empowerment of right skills". The integration of AI, VR, and MR technologies into the Skill India ecosystem will democratize access to the latest technologies and personalize learning pathways for the youth of this country. This is a big step toward that aim through partnership with Meta, which was announced today.

It will also develop a novel AI chatbot driven by Meta's open-source Llama model as part of this project. This chatbot will now be surfaced in the SID Portal, a flagship component of the country's skilling infrastructure. It will help the users through 24/7 engagements by giving them all the course details available to them, lecture summaries, and pertinent videos to solidify whatever material they have read. The users will thus be able to interface with the chatbot, conducted in multilingual modes-use English, Hindi, or Hinglish-and voice.

This technical collaboration with Sarvam AI for AI assistant will manage the development and deployment of the chatbot, and that will be a six months pilot phase. In this collaboration, Meta's open-source AI models will be accessed by India's AI ecosystem, creating an essential collaborative e-governance framework for impactful AI solutions that can harness large-scale socio-economic transformation under India's AI Mission.

The five CoEs that will be located at NSTIs will use the latest VR technology. Both learners and instructors would be able to undergo experiences in total immersion with the training. That the above-mentioned ability makes it possible to develop skills in this exciting but safe manner with true-to-real-world simulations, an enhancement to engagement and ease of access toward training for skill development, provides a boost.

Meta India's Vice President and Head of Public Policy, Shivnath Thukral, said, "By frontier technologies such as AI, VR, and MR, we at Meta are committed to making a meaningful difference in the economic development of India". He further added that these technologies would digitalise students, educators, and entrepreneurs with all tools needed to thrive in a digital-first world.