Inside the Rise of India's Voice-First Internet

Some startups are giving voice to the non-typing majority among India's 900 million internet users

- Shadma Shaikh LURU

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 software 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-IB 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 Gnani.ai.