India’s artificial intelligence market is entering a new phase as investors and businesses shift attention from text-based chatbots towards AI systems that can listen, speak and complete tasks in Indian languages.
The latest signal came this week from ElevenLabs, the London-based voice AI company, which said it plans to invest “hundreds of millions of dollars” in India. The company said India is now its second-largest market after the US, with more than 250 Indian businesses using its technology and more than 100 million AI-agent conversations recorded over the past year. The company said those conversations were across 14 Indian languages.
The investment comes as funding for voice AI companies is beginning to build in India. Bengaluru-based Ringg raised $10 million from Peak XV in August, taking its Series A total to $15.5 million. The company says its systems process about 20 million call attempts a month, with voice accounting for more than 70% of its business.
Navana.ai raised `40 crore in September to expand voice deployments in banking, financial services and insurance and develop speech models for Indian languages and dialects. The company said it currently manages more than 100 million voice-AI minutes for clients.
The money is also flowing into the underlying AI and speech infrastructure. Sarvam AI raised $234 million in the first close of a $300 million Series B in June. The company says its systems now handle more than two million voice conversations a day, alongside 10 million API calls a day. Its deployments include multilingual voice systems being used in sectors including finance and agriculture.
Further, Mahindra Finance, for example, has expanded its partnership with Sarvam to more than 10 million calls across 12 Indian languages, covering sales, collections and employee engagement.
Nasscom said in India Voice AI Readiness 2026 report that 31% of surveyed organisations have moved to limited production of Voice AI, while around 13% have scaled it across multiple customer journeys. It said that banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), telecom, e-commerce, retail and consumer goods, travel and logistics are among the main sectors adopting Voice AI.
The case for voice in India is not simply about making chatbots sound more human. Consumer behaviour is also creating a market for voice-based business interactions. A recent Truecaller study found that more than 76% of Indian consumers prefer talking to businesses over a phone call. That leaves companies with a large existing behaviour to automate rather than having to persuade consumers to adopt a completely new interface.
The business case is also being measured in terms of cost and revenue. The Nasscom survey found that 61% of organisations reported more than a 20% reduction in cost per eligible interaction, while 30% of scaled organisations reported a positive impact on revenue.
Government infrastructure is moving in parallel. BHASHINI and NITI Aayog agreed in August to develop “multilingual, voice-first AI solutions” for citizen services. In June, the Digital India BHASHINI Division also launched the VYOMA Innovation Challenge to promote open-source, multilingual, voice-first AI that can operate in offline and low-connectivity environments.
The Nasscom report said 63% of organisations ranked multilingual and Indian-language accuracy among their top three Voice AI spending priorities, alongside real-time agent assist, quality assurance analytics and autonomous voice agents.
Rajesh Nambiar, president, Nasscom, said, “Voice AI is creating a significant opportunity for India’s BPM sector to move beyond traditional voice operations towards AI-enabled, multilingual customer operations with greater ownership of outcomes. As organisations move from pilots to production, the opportunity will increasingly lie in building capabilities around multilingual performance, workflow integration, governance and continuous optimisation, areas that can strengthen India’s role in serving global customer operations.”
