Long read: Speak easy: How AI is giving voice to millions of Indians online

“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.”

Recognising this, a number of start ups are coming up with AI-enabled services built on voice:

““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.”

Now apps are being built with voice as the primary interface, replacing the Graphical User Interface (GUI) that has dominated computer systems for long.

“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.

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.

…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.

…Gnani.ai 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.

…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.”

The article goes on to highlight how these start ups are solving specific challenges using to AI to build these.