REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL (RFP)
Multilingual Audio Annotation, Transcription and Translation Services across Indian Languages
LEHS is a charitable organization in India whose purpose is to offer basic health and education for the poor. LEHS in furtherance of charitable objectives through its flagship programs Wadhwani AI which aims to build equitable and sustainable systems by making quality primary healthcare available and accessible to the underserved population and to bring the benefits of modern AI technology to underserved populations by building and deploying AI solutions for social impact across domains such as healthcare, agriculture, governance and education in India. LEHS aims to promote the integration of technologies, particularly in emerging domains like artificial intelligence and innovations into the Indian mainstream primary healthcare, education, and agriculture systems through a partnership with the State and National Government, apex institutions, international agencies, and private sector partners e.g. innovators, social enterprises and other ecosystem contributors in line with its stated objectives for the betterment of society particularly focusing on projects of national and social significance.
Wadhwani AI, a unit of LEHS, focuses on developing, deploying and evaluating artificial intelligence solutions to address critical social challenges in India, particularly in domains such as healthcare, agriculture, and education.
LEHS aims to promote the integration of technologies, particularly in emerging domains like artificial intelligence and innovations into the Indian mainstream primary healthcare, education, and agriculture systems through a partnership with the State and National Government, apex institutions, international agencies, and private sector partners e.g. innovators, social enterprises and other ecosystem contributors in line with its stated objectives for the betterment of society particularly focusing on projects of national and social significance. In line with its mission to support projects of national and social significance, LEHS also undertakes rigorous monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) activities to assess the impact, usability, and scalability of different programmatic interventions.
Wadhwani AI is building AI-enabled conversational assistant for healthcare use cases in India. The assistant needs to work in the languages that their users speak and write, including through voice-based interactions.
To build, improve and evaluate the assistant, Wadhwani AI requires language services across three workflows:
- ASR annotation: annotation and transcription of collected speech audio.
- Query translation (Indian language to English): translation of user query text, written in an Indian language, into English.
- Output translation (English to Indian language): translation of English text into Indian languages.
The initial requirement is for Hindi, Marathi and Oriya (Odia). Wadhwani AI expects to add other major Indian languages over time, including the scheduled languages of India. Volumes are not yet fixed and will vary by language and over time. This RFP therefore seeks to identify a vendor on the basis of capability, quality, data security and rates, under a rate contract that allows new languages and volumes to be added later. The content is health-related, so accuracy and fidelity to the original meaning are essential.
III. PROJECT OBJECTIVES:
The key objectives of this engagement are:
- Annotation: To annotate and transcribe audio data in Indian languages with high accuracy, ensuring linguistic correctness. All transcripts must be produced by human annotators, with independent human review and adjudication of discrepancies by a senior annotator.
- Translation: To translate text between Indian languages and English with high accuracy. Each translation must be followed by independent human review and correction by a second linguist, while preserving the original meaning of health-related content.
This engagement covers language services for data relating to the health domain in, for use by frontline health workers (FLWs) such as AWWs and ASHAs.
The selected agency is expected to handle:
- Regional dialects and colloquial expressions
- Code-switching and code-mixing
- Local pronunciation and variations
- Partial or incomplete sentences
The selected agency is also expected to:
- Provide qualified native-speake human annotators, transcribers, translators and reviewers for each language it commits to cover, demonstrated domain knowledge of healthcare and public health terminology. Annotate and transcribe audio data as per the annotation requirements and established annotation protocols (including standardized labeling guidelines, multi-pass quality verification, and defined dispute resolution/adjudication workflows).
- Maintain quality standards, incorporating feedback to correct outputs found not to meet required standards and reworking rejected batches at no additional cost
- Translate text from Indian languages to English, and from English to Indian languages, with independent review and correction.
- Carry out all annotation, transcription, translation and review in a purpose-built tool; spreadsheet-based work (for example, Excel) is not accepted. The tool should operate within the secure environment provided or approved by Wadhwani AI.
- Scale to additional Indian languages on request, under the terms of the rate contract.
All responses to this RFP must be received no later than [04/12/2026]. The proposal should be submitted only through e-mail in PDF format addressed Procurement Team in the below-given e-mail id: rfp.lehs@wadhwaniai.org
Note: Only shortlisted vendors will be contacted for presentations, sample tasks or negotiations. If you do not hear from us within two weeks of submission, consider your proposal not selected. LEHS reserves the right to reject any or all proposals and to negotiate terms and conditions with the selected vendor.
For detailed information, please check the complete version of the RFP attached below