India’s AI companies are yet to make a meaningful contribution to the overall AI landscape, but there are signs that they could be close to getting started.
India’s Sarvam AI, which has received substantial grants from the Indian government in terms of GPU resources, has been selected by Meta to bring Indian-language voices to Ray Ban Meta glasses. The integration will start with Hindi support, and will likely include other Indian languages down the line. Sarvam has been working on building India-specific AI models since it was founded in 2023.
“In partnership with @Meta, Sarvam is bringing Indic voices to Ray-Ban Meta glasses, starting with full Hindi support,” Sarvam posted on X. “Powered by Sarvam’s language models, Meta AI now lets users interact hands-free in Hindi to ask questions, get real-time information, capture photos and videos, answer calls and texts, and control media with natural voice commands. This is the first step toward broader Indic language support on wearables, as well as enabling on-device AI models on novel platforms like AI glasses,” it added.
Meta wrote in a blogpost that the update of Hindi language support for its glasses uses tools from “Sarvam, one of the leading foundation model companies in India”.
This might be the most significant deal for an Indian AI company. Thus far, Indian AI companies have promised much but delivered little. Ola Krutrim has seemingly fizzled out after a flashy launch which saw it become India’s fastest unicorn. Sarvam has been around for a while, but seems to have not had any major releases which would make a splash either in the global AI space or with Indian users. Surprisingly, hardly any consumer-facing Indian AI companies have made it big either.
And while an integration with a Meta product is impressive, one wonders if Indian AI companies are being ambitious enough with their AI roadmaps. Sarvam has thus far focused only on India-specific use cases, primarily building models for Indian languages. China, meanwhile, is building a slew of AI companies which are creating general models for all kinds of use-cases. These models are competing with the ones made by the US, and Chinese companies seem to release updates every week which are tested out in the real world. It might be a while before Indian AI companies can hope to create models that can make a splash in the global AI space, but Sarvam’s integration with Meta for Hindi models might be a sign that it does seem to have created some models that Meta deems are better than the competition at Hindi speech.