Lightspeed-backed homegrown generative artificial intelligence (AI) startup, Sarvam AI is working towards launching its first commercial 'voice-to-voice endpoint' in the next six to twelve months, cofounder Vivek Raghavan says at annual event for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) startups, SaaSBoomi.

“You can expect these kinds of voice-to-voice endpoints in at least 10 (Indian) languages and you can expect some experiences built upon this and also there are example experiences in the sense that there are ways for people to build things on top of it,” Raghavan adds.

The LLMs need to be voice-based and action-oriented. He pointed out that it needs to be effective in informal dialects.

“Building Indic language models is important but that alone probably won't lead to the result we are looking for which is the widespread use of Gen AI in India. Voice is the primary way by which people will access LLMs in India. We need to have voice-driven interfaces/systems, only then can we have accessibility to a large number of people,” adds Raghavan.

The first open-source Hindi language model was released by Sarvam AI in December last year. The firm said the AI model is the first in a series of models that will contribute to the ecosystem with open models and datasets to encourage innovation in Indian language artificial intelligence.

Raghavan stated that OpenHathi has demonstrated improved performance when it comes to English-to-Hindi translation when compared to GPT-4 and GPT-3.

“We looked at a translation task as a proxy to understand how well the understanding of these languages was. GPT's performance is decent in Hindi but if you go to languages beyond that, you see that the performance really falls away. And if you're looking at Indic languages, it gives you an idea that when you do these custom things, you can make these models work significantly better,” Raghavan says.