Tulu Setu ("Tulu bridge") is a small translation tool built for the Tulu-speaking community — for anyone learning the language, teaching it to their kids, or just wanting to write a message home in Tulu.
Setu blends a hand-checked phrasebook with an AI translator for open text, now across English, Kannada, Hindi, and Tulu. Tulu is a low-resource language for AI models, so free-text translations are experimental — the phrasebook is the more reliable source.
Common words and phrases, with romanized Tulu, a Kannada-script rendering, and a play button on every entry.
Tulu is a Dravidian language spoken mainly across Dakshina Kannada and southern Udupi in coastal Karnataka, and in northern Kasaragod in Kerala. It's an independent branch of the Dravidian family, not a dialect of Kannada, despite the two sharing a script today.
The language was historically written in the Tigalari script, which developed from the Grantha script around the 12th century and was used mainly for religious texts. Most everyday Tulu writing today uses the Kannada script instead, and there's ongoing community effort to revive Tigalari.
UNESCO classifies Tulu as vulnerable — one more reason projects like this, built with and for the community, matter.
Read the fuller history of Tulu — from its Dravidian roots to today →