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Mint
6 days ago
- Business
- Mint
Inside the making of India's default internet interface
Bengaluru: Geeta Nikam, 38, speaks into her smartphone in Marathi as she makes her way through a bustling vegetable market in Hiware Bazar, a village in Maharashtra, looking for seeds for her farm. A first-time internet and mobile phone user, Nikam has never typed a word. Keyboards, especially in Indic scripts, feel alien. In Ludhiana, a large textile manufacturer with crores of rupees in revenue spends his entire working day talking to people on his phone to get tasks done. A computer system loaded with the business softwares of the world is useless to him. Nikam and the textile manufacturer are part of the 'non-typing majority' among India's 900 million internet users. These are primarily people from Tier II, Tier III cities and villages, where English is uncommon and digital literacy is just emerging. Their preference for voice communication highlights a fundamental need for new interaction methods. 'Nobody's typing in Gujarati or Marathi," says Abhishek Upperwal, founder of Soket AI Labs. Founded in 2019 by Upperwal, Soket AI Labs is an AI research company developing multilingual large language models such as Pragna-1B for Indian languages. It is among the four startups selected by the government under its IndiaAI initiative to co-develop indigenous AI systems. Voice remains the 'primary interface' for most Indians, says Upperwal. These users, including rural entrepreneurs, gig workers and homemakers, are reshaping India's internet, demanding tools that listen and respond in their native languages. Those demands are slowly being addressed by AI startups. In the drought-prone villages of Maharashtra, for instance, farmers can now learn about crop insurance, credit eligibility and weather-resilient agriculture without reading a single word. They receive three-minute voice calls from bots deployed by a local non-banking financial company (NBFC), in partnership with Bengaluru-based conversational AI firm The bot speaks in their own dialect, poses simple questions and delivers tailored advice. In one pilot, more than 15,000 farmers across 120 villages received weekly updates and 38% of them adopted new crop diversification strategies using this information, according to Voice AI is improving accessibility and also reshaping how information is delivered at scale. In Tamil Nadu, the same technology was used to deliver financial literacy and health education to over 12,000 women in 85 villages. Following the initiative, 59% of the participants opened their first savings accounts and 41% reported improved medical savings behaviour, the company states. These pilots, in some ways, demonstrate how a voice-native internet might function. 'India's voice-first internet will likely be a dynamic blend of multilingual, context-aware, and highly personalized experiences," says Ganesh Gopalam, CEO and cofounder of From GUIs to voice In 2019, a Google report said that Hindi had become the second-most used language globally on Google Assistant, just behind English, indicating how voice was gaining ground in multilingual markets such as India. Around 60% of Indian users interact with voice assistants on their smartphones, making voice a core part of everyday digital life. A subsequent report by WATConsult found that 76% of Indian users were familiar with speech and voice-recognition technology, which reflects a natural shift in a country where smartphone access is high, but digital and linguistic literacy is not evenly distributed. A growing reliance on voice has emerged as a workaround to the limitations of Graphical User Interface (GUI)-based systems, which require users to be comfortable navigating English-language menus. A GUI lets you interact with computers and devices using visuals such as buttons, icons and menus. This method of using computers started evolving in the 1970s with Xerox PARC's Alto. GUIs gained popularity with Apple's Macintosh in 1984 and then expanded through Microsoft Windows, transforming computing from complex text-based command systems into a more visual experience. 'GUIs ruled for decades because Apple and Microsoft made screens and clicks the global standard, but they're a poor fit for India's chaotic and voice-driven markets," says Tushar Shinde, founder of Vaani Research, an enterprise voice AI startup. 'With millions of non-typing users juggling dialects and high-volume businesses, voice is the natural interface. It's how we've always connected," he adds. 'Many entrepreneurs are earning crores in revenue but barely use any software, because they spend most of their day just talking to people. The systems built for them were never in a format they found acceptable," says Shinde, referring to enterprise softwares built specifically for small and medium businesses. 'That's where voice comes in." His startup builds voice agents for insurance, banking and healthcare clients. Voice as an interface is now gaining prominence with advanced AI, as it offers hands-free convenience and challenges the long-standing dominance of GUIs in many everyday interactions. This is especially relevant in markets such as India, where GUI-based systems that come designed with dropdown menus, buttons, toggles and input fields require a level of literacy and linguistic ease that many users simply don't have. Though Indic keyboards were introduced as an alternative for users like Nikam, they remain clunky and unreliable. Autocorrect often yields incorrect results and filling out forms in Hindi or Tamil becomes a frustrating ordeal. Even targeted solutions such as Indus OS, founded by an IIT Bombay alumnus to create a multilingual app ecosystem, struggled to take off due to its heavy reliance on text navigation. In contrast, voice, which is rooted in India's oral culture, is now emerging as a more intuitive bridge to digital access. Unlike GUI-based apps, voice systems deliver content naturally in the user's own words. A 2025 study cited by Gnani suggests that educational content delivered in local dialects results in 47% higher retention than standardized language formats. Government push India's voice AI sector is experiencing massive growth, driven by the country's linguistic diversity and increasing demand for voice-first digital interactions. Under the government's IndiaAI mission, launched in 2024 with a five-year budget of ₹10,372 crore, four startups—Sarvam, Soket Labs, and been selected to build foundational AI models in India. Sarvam AI has developed Sarvam-M, a 24-billion-parameter multilingual large language model trained in 10 Indian languages, aiming to enhance reasoning tasks such as mathematics, coding and multilingual comprehension. Despite early criticism, the model is recognized for its technical achievements in building AI infrastructure within India. specializes in voice-first agentic AI solutions, and supports over 40 languages, including 12 Indian languages. The platform handles more than 30 million voice interactions daily, serving over 150 enterprises across India and the US. In Gurugram, Soket AI Labs is commercializing its Realtime Speech API, enabling AI agents to augment call centres with support for Hindi, Tamil and Marathi, addressing India's non-typing users. Last year, in one of its more ambitious endeavours, Soket AI Labs developed its foundational AI model, Pragna-1B (like Open AI's ChatGPT) with a focus on Indian languages. But in the absence of venture capital funding for research efforts, Soket pivoted to building monetizable voice APIs for customer support, marketing and sales, which proved to be a more immediate route to revenue, one that still serves India's non-typing majority. Startups building voice-based applications in India lack the kind of institutional support and infrastructure readily available to their western counterparts. As a result, most are building voice-first applications for business use-cases to continue to fund their foundational research journey and attract investments. Tech chops and challenges Building voice AI for India is as much a linguistic challenge as a technological one. 'If there are five tokens for English, there will be almost 15 to 20 for Hindi," says Upperwal, pointing to the extra compute required for Indic languages. A token is a unit of text, such as a word or character or subword, which language models use to process and generate language. The more tokens a sentence requires, the more memory and compute power the model needs to handle it, making Indian languages more resource intensive to train. Soket introduced a novel tokenization method that significantly reduces this burden, making AI systems faster and more cost-effective for Indian languages. Upperwal says that apart from core infrastructure, India's voice-first internet also relies on domain-specific intelligence tailored to Indian needs. 'Sectors like education and law are especially underserved. Western LLM models like ChatGPT don't work well with Indian legal systems. It often mixes up Indian and US laws," he says, recalling how a legal AI startup ran into challenges while fine-tuning an open-source model after it began hallucinating hybrid jurisprudence. Soket is now exploring collaborations with domain experts to build models from scratch, rooted in Indian context and vernacular data. 'We're not domain experts, we build systems. But if startups come in with their expertise, we can train models together and open-source them for the ecosystem," he explains. Indian startups still rely heavily on models like OpenAI and Deepgram, trained on Western datasets. These models often misinterpret names, accents or local nuances, especially in sectors such as healthcare or banking, where clarity is critical. To close this gap, the IndiaAI mission has allocated subsidies and compute access to startups such as Soket and Vaani, encouraging them to build speech systems trained on Indian datasets. 'These infrastructure breakthroughs don't just make AI cheaper. They make it accessible to speakers of Hindi, Gujarati or Marathi," says Shinde. 'When an AI enabled system can understand a manufacturer in a remote village asking for a loan, that's inclusion at the infrastructure level." For Global South Startups, meanwhile, are also rethinking how voice might reshape user behaviour. 'Imagine booking a cab or shopping online with a single voice command," says Shinde. In low-bandwidth towns where GUIs fail to load, voice interfaces will allow people to interact with the web through language and not literacy. 'We could go back to how people actually used to shop conversationally, through discovery, without filters and dropdowns," he adds. According to Prashanth Prakash, founding partner at Accel, voice will become the default interface for India's most critical sectors and redefine how people interact with information. 'In healthcare and education, voice won't replace doctors or teachers, but it will radically change explainability and access," he says. From appointment bookings to post-discharge summaries and classroom companions that personalize learning, voice interfaces offer a lower friction and highly intuitive alternative. 'Every doctor will have a co-pilot. Every workflow will start with voice," he adds. The government thinks voice tools will play a key role in frontline service delivery. From crop advisories to citizen helplines, voice is being positioned as the cornerstone of public digital infrastructure, says Abhishek Singh, CEO of IndiaAI mission. 'If a voice-enabled advisory tool trained on Indian datasets can help a farmer here, it'll likely work anywhere in the Global South," Singh adds. Limitations with voice Voice-based applications offer a natural bridge to India's non-typing internet users, but the path is riddled with complexity. India's diverse linguistic landscape acts as a hurdle in accurate speech recognition. While voice bots are changing habits, making digital interaction easier for those unfamiliar with typing, accuracy drops sharply in noisy environments and with dialectal variations. 'Replacing GUIs with voice at scale in India faces major design and infrastructure challenges, particularly for first-time digital users," says Gopalan of pointing out that ensuring accurate voice recognition across diverse accents, dialects and languages continues to remain a challenge. Farmer Geeta Nikam admits that she uses voice commands to browse ecommerce websites but has never made a purchase using her device yet. India needs a system that enables confidence, ease and convenience for someone like Nikam to not just browse but place an order successfully using voice commands. When a billion Indians like her are able to navigate the web effortlessly by speaking, just as others do by typing, India's internet will look and sound different. Read more on IndiaAI Mission in tomorrow's Long Story.
The Hindu
30-05-2025
- Business
- The Hindu
Three more start-ups selected to get GPU access for Indian AI models
Three firms — Gurugram-based Soket AI, Delhi-based and Bengaluru-based — have been selected in the IndiaAI Mission's ongoing drive to facilitate the development of an indigenous foundational AI large language model (LLM). 'Like Sarvam AI, which was selected earlier this year as the first such firm, these three teams also have a very big target in front of them,' Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw said. By being selected, these firms will get access to the Common Compute facility, giving them access to thousands of graphics processing units (GPUs) on which AI models are trained and deployed. With the government's facility, operated by a clutch of large tech firms like Sify, set to have a total of 34,000 GPUs soon, Mr. Vaishnaw said that the 'worry' of whether 'India will be able to get that kind of compute' is 'practically over'. co-founder Ganesh Gopalan said that the company had been 'developing voice-to-voice large language models for India and the world, because we believe transformative AI must speak the language of the people it serves.' The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology's Additional Secretary Abhishek Singh said that the IndiaAI Mission has also been working on hackathons with 'allied Ministries' like the Ministry of Home Affairs — for classifying cyber crimes — and with the Geological Survey of India for mineral discovery. 'Very soon we will be working with the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and other ministries for launching more problem statements to give opportunities to our startups and researchers to contribute to solutions,' he said.
Mint
30-05-2025
- Business
- Mint
IndiaAI Mission gets 16,000 new GPUs, three more foundational models
New Delhi: The Union government on Friday approved the empanelment of 15,640 new graphic processing unit (GPU) processors from data centre and cloud service providers, and also appointed three new startups that will get access to these chips for free, to train their artificial intelligence models. Sanjeev Bikhchandani's Info Edge Ventures-backed AI startup, was one of the three startups appointed to build a sovereign foundational AI model for voice-based AI services. The startup will build a 14-billion parameter voice AI model and real-time speech processing and 'advanced reasoning capabilities.' Foundational AI models are typically better when they are based on larger volumes of training data. But, smaller models are less expensive to train, are more targeted towards specific industries, and are easier to run. The other two startups appointed include Bengaluru-based Sokal AI Labs, and Noida-based Gan AI. While Sokai AI is building a 120-billion parameter foundational AI model catering to defence, education and healthcare sectors, Gan AI will build a 70-billion parameter multilingual foundational model for varied applications. Sovereign AI models refer to foundational algorithms built for usage in generative AI applications, but not by global companies. Sovereign models are typically trained on a nation's indigenous datasets, which theoretically help in adding local market data, language and context to AI applications. The three startups join Peak XV-backed Sarvam AI, which became the first startup appointed by the ministry of electronics and information technology (Meity) to build a foundational AI model for India. Union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that the first of the four foundational models will be rolled out before the end of 2025. In terms of compute, Hiranandani Group's Yotta Data Services was empanelled by Meity a second time, and will supply over 8,000 units of Nvidia's B200 GPUs to cater to the mission. A senior official with direct knowledge of the matter said requesting anonymity that the GPUs will be brought into service within the next two to three months, as Yotta is still in the process of installing them in its data centres. Sify Digital Services was also a part of the empanelled GPU providers, and will supply an unspecified number of Nvidia's H100, H200 and L4 GPU chips. Access to these GPUs is crucial in terms of training AI models. Ganesh Gopalan, chief executive of told Mint that the government empanelment will reduce the company's operating cost to 'one-tenth of what it was before.' Abhishek Upperwal, chief executive of Soket AI, added that 'over 70%' of the company's cost of research and development, as well as training of AI models, are linked to access to GPUs for computing power. 'This is the least possible cost of compute that we're getting access to. We're in talks with venture capital firms for a seed funding round in order to accelerate our research, and within the next one year, a version of our foundational model should be ready,' Upperwal said. Abhishek Singh, chief executive of India AI Mission and additional secretary, Meity, added that the Centre had received 'more than 500 applications for developing India's foundational models.' 'There will be more startup selections in the next few days. On 9 June, Meity is also meeting applicants to empanel more cloud compute providers, and there will be a rolling empanelment process where vendors will be brought online as and when required,' Singh added. The $1.2-billion IndiaAI Mission is tasked with backing startups to build foundational AI models in India, create a subsidized cloud compute platform to help academia, researchers and startups access GPUs to train AI models, and create datasets in Indian languages to train AI models. It is also set to build a marketplace to help startups developing AI models to sell their services to clients. Access to a foundational model is expected to reduce a nation's dependence on other countries for what is being viewed as a fundamental piece of technology going forward. Entrepreneurs added that the development can amplify market outreach for startups building sovereign AI models. 'The government itself can be a key client. But additionally, reducing the cost of compute can help startups build models more efficiently, which in turn can reduce the need for capital that is the biggest cost factor behind developing AI models and conducting R&D,' Gopalan added. Vaishnaw added that the new announcements mark 'significant progress' under the goals set forth by the IndiaAI Mission. 'We have 367 datasets on the mission's non-personal data platform, AI Kosh. The entire ecosystem is being built right now in AI, and the IT industry should capture this transition as an opportunity, rather than be disrupted by it. AI development is also creating an opportunity to reverse India's brain drain, and bring talented engineers back to the country,' the minister said.
Economic Times
30-05-2025
- Business
- Economic Times
After Sarvam.ai, Soket AI, Gnani.ai, Gan.ai to now build foundation AI models, says IndiaAI Mission
IndiaAI Mission on Friday announced Soket AI, and will be developing foundation artificial intelligence (AI) models apart from that was initially selected. ET had reported this more than a month AI will develop an open source 120 billion parameter foundation model optimised for the country's linguistic diversity targeting sectors such as defence, healthcare and education. will build a 14 billion parameter voice AI foundation model delivering multilingual, real time speech processing with advanced reasoning will create a 70 billion parameter multilingual foundation model targeting superhuman text-to-speech (TTS) model capabilities.'We are working on another PhD programme and a large talent development programme starting from the very basic to a really advanced level so that the foundational research in AI can also be funded out of the AI mission,' said IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw. 'I hope some of the smart young engineers working on these teams would like to relocate back to India,' he added. He was referring to the three teams selected to build foundation AI models. 'We're proud to lead the way in developing voice-to-voice large language models for India and the world, because we believe transformative AI must speak the language of the people it serves,' said Ganesh Gopalan, co-founder and chief executive of IndiaAI Mission also said there were now 34,333 GPUs available on the IndiaAI Compute portal. These include GPUs of Nvidia, AMD, AWS, and Intel. The offering comprises 15,100 H100 Nvidia GPUs, 8,192 Nvidia B200 GPUs, 4,812 Nvidia H200 GPUs, and 1,973 Nvidia L40S GPUs. The other GPU variants each comprise less than 1,000 or 500 in seven technically qualified bidders in the second round of the GPU tender are empanelled, it said. However, there was no information on how many of these 34,333 GPUs have been assigned AI workloads and are currently being used. The seven empanelled bidders are Cyfuture India, Ishan Infotech, Locuz Enterprise Solutions, Netmagic IT Services (NTT GDC India) Sify Digital Services, Vensysco Technologies, and Yotta Data Services. In all, 367 datasets have been uploaded on AI Kosh, Vaishnaw revealed. AI Kosh is the government's platform that provides a repository of datasets, models and use cases to enable AI innovation. It also features AI sandbox capabilities. IndiaAI Mission said on May 16 it had received 506 foundation AI proposals across the three phases. Given the overwhelming response and continued interest, the mission has decided to extend the deadline for submissions under phase 3 of the call for proposals. The earlier deadline was April 30.'Further dates for submission of proposals, the acceptance of new applications post April 30, will be announced subsequently, as per requirements, once the examination of proposals already submitted has been completed," IndiaAI said on its part of the first phase of approvals, was selected to initiate the development of an indigenous foundational multi-modal, multi-scale model will have 70 billion parameters. It is developing three model variants. These include Sarvam-Large for advanced reasoning and generation, Sarvam-Small for real-time interactive applications, and Sarvam-Edge for compact on-device will get access to 4,096 Nvidia H100 graphics processing units (GPU) for six months from the IndiaAI Mission.
Time of India
30-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
After Sarvam.ai, Soket AI, Gnani.ai, Gan.ai to now build foundation AI models, says IndiaAI Mission
The IndiaAI Mission on Friday announced Soket AI , , and will be developing foundation artificial intelligence (AI) models apart from , which was initially selected. ET had reported this more than a month ago. Soket AI will develop an open source 120 billion parameter foundation model optimised for the country's linguistic diversity targetting sectors such as defence, healthcare and education. will build a 14 billion parameter voice AI foundation model delivering multilingual, real-time speech processing with advanced reasoning capabilities. will create a 70 billion parameter multilingual foundation model targeting superhuman text-to-speech (TTS) model capabilities. The IndiaAI Mission also said that 34,333 GPUs are now available on the IndiaAI Compute portal. These include GPUs from Nvidia, AMD, AWS, and Intel. The offering comprises 15,100 H100 Nvidia GPUs, 8,192 Nvidia B200 GPUs, 4,812 Nvidia H200 GPUs, and 1,973 Nvidia L40S GPUs. The other GPU variants each comprise fewer than 1,000 or 500 in number. All seven technically qualified bidders in the second round of the GPU tender are empanelled, it said. Live Events The seven empanelled bidders are Cyfuture India, Ishan Infotech, Locuz Enterprise Solutions, Netmagic IT Services (NTT GDC India), Sify Digital Services, Vensysco Technologies, and Yotta Data Services. Discover the stories of your interest Blockchain 5 Stories Cyber-safety 7 Stories Fintech 9 Stories E-comm 9 Stories ML 8 Stories Edtech 6 Stories 367 datasets have been uploaded on AI Kosh, Vaishnaw revealed. AI Kosh is the government's platform that provides a repository of datasets, models and use cases to enable AI innovation. It also features AI sandbox capabilities. IndiaAI Mission on May 16 had said that it has received 506 foundation AI proposals across the three phases. Given the overwhelming response and continued interest, the mission has decided to extend the deadline for submissions under phase 3 of the call for proposals. The earlier deadline was April 30. 'Further dates for submission of proposals, the acceptance of new applications post April 30, will be announced subsequently, as per requirements, once the examination of proposals already submitted has been completed," IndiaAI said on its website. As part of the first phase of approvals, was selected to initiate the development of an indigenous foundational model. Sarvam's multimodal, multi-scale model will have 70 billion parameters. Sarvam cofounder Vivek Raghavan had said on April 26 that the model will be completed in six months. Capable of reasoning, designed for voice, and fluent in Indian languages, Sarvam's model will be ready for secure, population-scale deployment, the startup had said in a statement. According to cofounder Pratyush Kumar, Sarvam is developing three model variants -- Sarvam-Large for advanced reasoning and generation, Sarvam-Small for real-time interactive applications, and Sarvam-Edge for compact on-device tasks. Sarvam will get access to 4,096 Nvidia H100 graphics processing units (GPUs) for six months from the IndiaAI Mission's common compute cluster to train its model, people in the know had said. 'We are collaborating with AI4Bharat at IIT-Madras, a leader in Indian language AI research, to build these models,' Kumar had said.
