Digital Labor: Project Karya

Karya aims to enable supplemental income opportunities for people in low-income and marginalized communities by connecting them to AI enabled digital work. It capitalizes on two major trends. First, AI is penetrating all walks of life with every increasing focus on enabling natural language interactions with AI systems. Second and more importantly, technology is getting better and cheaper with smartphone prices and data connectivity costs decreasing every day. Particularly in India, a majority of even low-income households have access to a smartphone.

We have built a smartphone-based digital work platform that makes a wide variety of language-based digital tasks accessible to people in low-income communities particularly in rural India. The open-sourced platform is being used for several major data collection efforts in India.

In addition to being a source of income, participating in such a platform can boost the digital skills of the workers. Our recent research also shows that digital work can be a great mechanism to deliver knowledge and skills to users.

The project was recently spun off as a impact-focused startup. More details can be found at https://karya.in (opens in new tab).