At least three Indian voice AI startups raised funds in January, and several more are in talks with potential investors, according to investors and founders.
Bolna AI, a Y-Combinator startup, raised $6.3 million this month, while Ringg AI raised $5.5 million and ArrowHead raised $3 million. Others like Navana AI, Vaani AI and JobsUPI are looking to raise funds in the coming months.
Rising adoption, huge market potential and technological development are driving investor interest. This is in line with trends globally, where companies like Deepgram, and Synthesia are mopping up hundreds of millions of dollars. Big tech firms such as Google are also betting on voice models.
Startups like Maya Research, Soket Labs, and Pixa AI are building voice models from the ground up focused on Indian languages.
“The final frontier of access is voice, because if a person can talk to the computer team and get back instructions or information or get an agent to work, I think that’s the final product, especially in a country which has so many different languages and dialects; 22 official languages,” Infosys cofounder Nandan Nilekani said at an industry event in Bengaluru.
India can have a significant role in voice AI by making the design frugal so that it is inexpensive to operate, and by dealing with multitude of languages and dialects, he told ET on the sidelines of the event. It has significant use cases in areas such as railways, Nilekani said, adding: “It is really applications that will get funded.”
Voice is an interesting way of looking at a killer app, which for a market like India has enormous significance, Vishal Dhupar, managing director-South Asia at AI chip maker Nvidia, said at the same event. But the biggest question, according to him, is making it seamless, building trust and reducing the cost so that it can be adopted at scale.