NoMind

Tshangla, or Sharchopkha, is the everyday language of eastern Bhutan, spoken by around 157,000 people here. You hear it on national radio and television, yet it has no standard writing system and is almost entirely absent from digital technology. UNESCO lists it as vulnerable.

NoMind, Bhutan's first AI startup, is building the first end-to-end language stack for it: machine translation between Tshangla, Dzongkha and English, speech recognition that turns spoken Tshangla into text, and text-to-speech that gives written content a natural Tshangla voice. No usable public datasets exist, so the team records, transcribes and translates all of its data in-house, and is writing its own spelling conventions in Dzongkha script along the way.

For people in the east who speak Tshangla but cannot read or write, speech technology opens up services that are text-only today. The team also plans meeting transcription for government offices, where Dzongkha, English and Tshangla mix in the same sentence. We support the work with Claude seats for the team.