Artificial intelligence systems can struggle to understand spoken Telugu, with speech recognition and translation errors sometimes changing the meaning of questions and leading to incorrect answers, a study by researchers from IIIT-H has found. The researchers developed VakQA, which they describe as the first benchmark for evaluating spoken question-answering in Telugu. It contains 2,001 factoid question-answer pairs covering science, general knowledge, politics, history, culture, and geography, along with 2.53 hours of speech recordings. Tests found that translating Telugu questions into English reduced Gemini’s performance on 18.8% of questions, while switching from Telugu text to speech reduced performance on 21.2%. The researchers said the findings show how errors can accumulate across a voice-al pipeline and underline the need to evaluate AI directly in Indian languages rather than assume that performance in English will translate to Telugu. VakQA was developed by IIIT-H researchers and Santosh Kesiraju of Brno University of Technology. The benchmark has been publicly released and was accepted for presentation at IEEE Spoken Language Technology 2026.

Disney chief Josh D’Amaro, in a move that shows he’s trying to position the Mouse House as a tech-forward entertainment company, has tapped veteran technology executive Karandeep Anand as its first chief technology officer. Most recently, Anand was CEO of Character.AI, a generative AI chatbot company. About a year ago, Disney accused Character.AI of “blatantly infringing” its copyrights and sent the tech startup a cease-and-desist letter demanding it remove Disney characters from its platform. Character.AI complied with the request. As CTO, Anand will oversee enterprise technology, infrastructure, data and AI platforms, product and engineering. He will work across the technology teams in Disney’s segments to “further modernize” how the company builds and delivers technology company-wide. Anand holds a computer science degree from the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. He also has a marketing and strategy certification from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

Former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) D. Subbarao on Saturday said UPI may look like an inevitable revolution today but it is the result of years of institutional choices, technological innovation and determined execution. Speaking at the release of a book ‘Cashless Nation: How UPI Changed Everything’ authored by Santanu Paul and B. Sambamurthy, he said UPI is not just a new payment product. It is a new payment ecosystem — an open, interoperable public infrastructure that has transformed financial inclusion and enabled unprecedented private innovation. The International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Hyderabad, which played host to the event, said the book chronicles the origin story of UPI and the rise of India as a digital superpower. UPI celebrated its 10th anniversary this year. Congratulating the authors, IIIT Hyderabad Director Sandeep Shukla said it is a well-researched book that captures an important transformation in India’s journey towards a cashless nation. UPI is a technology that has made the world sit up and look at India as a global leader in payment technology.