Most of the technology we use every day was built for a handful of the world's most spoken languages. At the Monlam Tibetan IT Research Center, we are building for ours.

Founded in Dharamshala by Geshe Lobsang Monlam, we are a small but deeply dedicated team working at a unique intersection: preserving a language with rich history while pushing the boundaries of modern artificial intelligence. Our flagship project, Monlam AI, is a pioneering digital platform built entirely around the Tibetan language.

In a world where AI is reshaping how communities access and use knowledge, the Center believes the Tibetan community's rich knowledge and perspective have an important role to play in that global transformation.

On the morning of November 3, 2023, we shared our prototype with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Later that day, we officially launched the platform to the public alongside Sikyong Penpa Tsering La and Speaker Khenpo Sonam Tenphel La. It was a proud moment, but it was only day one.

In the tech industry, Tibetan is considered a low resource language. That is simply a clinical way of saying there isn't enough existing digital data to teach a machine how to understand its nuance, structure, and character.

We didn't view this as a permanent roadblock. We saw it as an engineering challenge. Through collaboration with public and private partners, our team is manually building the datasets from the ground up. We are proving that a lack of resources isn't an excuse to be left behind. It just means you have to build the foundation yourself.

We are moving beyond tactical preservation. By focusing heavily on strategic product management, we aren't just launching scattered tools. We are designing a cohesive digital ecosystem where the Tibetan language works effortlessly. That ecosystem currently includes:

• Machine Translation — English-to-Tibetan and Tibetan-to-English translation
• Optical Character Recognition (OCR) — for digitizing Tibetan text
• Speech-to-Text — converting spoken Tibetan into written form
• Text-to-Speech — generating spoken Tibetan from text
• Melong.ai — a multilingual, multimodal platform supporting over 140 languages, accepting both text and image inputs, offering intelligent tools for research, language learning, and textual analysis

The Center's other ongoing projects include the Monlam Grand Dictionary, a comprehensive Tibetan-language reference, and continued work in Tibetan font and typesetting design to keep the written language accessible in digital form.

We don't measure our success just by the technology we build, but by the people who actually use it.

Today, Monlam AI is trusted by roughly 20,000 active users every month. Our flagship model, Monlam Think, consistently sets the standard. It scores 73% across our internal evaluations of Tibetan history and literature, and achieves 71% on the CBSE Class 12 Tibetan Exam.

Preservation is vital, but it is only the first step. Over the next decade, our vision is to weave Tibetan knowledge systems, Buddhist philosophy, and our cultural heritage seamlessly into the world's technological progress. We are making sure that as the world moves forward, the Tibetan language is right there with it.