In India’s hinterlands, where English fluency is rare, internet bandwidth often lags and smartphones may still be shared among families, a quiet tech revolution is reshaping the way people find jobs. Voice AI, once a novelty reserved for customer support or virtual assistants, is now becoming a powerful force in recruitment across traditional sectors like manufacturing, BFSI, retail, logistics, and agriculture.
At the forefront of this transformation is a new generation of AI-driven voice agents, built for India’s diverse linguistic and cultural landscape. Their role? To bridge the country’s deep skill gap and growing employment demand by speaking the language of India’s vernacular job seekers, literally and figuratively.
India’s informal and semi-formal workforce is vast, comprising over 80% of all employed people. Most of this population communicates in regional languages, often lacks digital literacy, and relies heavily on basic phones rather than apps or email.
Traditional HR tech systems weren’t designed for this segment, especially in the informal sector. The result has been a fractured recruitment pipeline filled with inefficiencies, high dropout rates, and costly manual processes.
Voice AI platforms are now trained on fundamental recruiter-candidate interactions across India’s many dialects, capturing nuances that range from hesitation markers to regional slang.
Catering to the Indian Audience
Companies like Hunar.AI have created contextual training layers over foundational LLMs (like those from OpenAI and Google) to personalise each conversation. The AI model is fine-tuned to understand whether a pause means hesitation or a network lag, and whether an objection is genuine or circumstantial.
The startup also hired 30 recruiters to conduct recruitment across various industries. These conversations were recorded and were used to build a contextual layer around recruitment to capture different dialects and how they speak, Krishna Khandelwal, cofounder and CEO of Hunar.AI, told AIM.
Additionally, “none of the individuals whose voices were recorded was replicated or cloned. The system is not designed to mimic or impersonate specific people. The voice models were created using a combination of licensed datasets and ethically sourced synthetic voice technology,” said Harjoth Sudan, business lead, AI-enabled services at Hunar AI.
These AI agents might ask if a person has experience selling gold loans, probe into how they generated leads, and assess their willingness to work in the field, all in Hindi, Kannada, or Bhojpuri. The result is a dynamic understanding of candidate readiness.
Hiring Speed and Scale
Recruitment that once took four to five days now happens in under 24 hours.
A leading Indian quick commerce company, which onboards tens of thousands of delivery workers monthly, drastically reduced conversion time by deploying voice AI. Instead of waiting for human recruiters to connect with each lead manually, the voice agent automatically initiates contact, handles documentation guidance, and even nudges the user to install the app and accept the first order. What used to be a leaky, human-driven funnel is now a scalable and responsive hiring engine.
SquadStack, another industry player in this space, handles nearly 50,000 voice interactions within the period of a single meeting, even in low-connectivity areas. Their models are trained on over five lakh hours of contact centre audio, offering fluency in six languages, including Hindi, Tamil, and Malayalam.
“The idea of voice AI replacing human recruiters often triggers healthy scepticism, but when framed as a collaborative partner, the ecosystem becomes far more receptive,” Sudan added. Many HR leaders and talent acquisition heads view voice AI as a scalable extension of their team, particularly beneficial in frontline or high-turnover positions where speed and consistency are essential. The emphasis is on augmentation rather than replacement, he said.
Voice AI in Career Counselling
In a society where career counselling is often limited to the urban elite, AI could become the first accessible guide for India’s vernacular workforce.
Hunar.AI has started piloting career discovery features within its voice agents. A delivery executive might be asked if they know Excel, and could be guided to a data entry role. Such interaction opens up mobility in jobs, not just across geography, but across skill levels.
Voice AI agents now also act as post-hire feedback gatherers, calling workers after the fifth or tenth assignment to understand job satisfaction, grievances, or logistical issues, feeding insights to the HR teams.
Bias Reduction and Inclusion
Unlike traditional hiring processes, where recruiters might favour candidates based on name, gender, caste, religion or location, AI agents can potentially treat everyone equally. By objectively assessing responses and screening based on skills or intent, not identity, these systems promote fairer hiring across India’s socio-cultural divides.
Voice AI also supports differently-abled users who may struggle with digital interfaces. For many, speaking into a phone is far easier than navigating a smartphone app or typing in English.
Apurv Agrawal, cofounder and CEO of SquadStack, told AIM that SquadStack’s mass hiring processes typically do not focus on religious backgrounds, which may help minimise biases. Human recruiters might unconsciously let biases influence their decisions based on names or personal interactions, he said.
However, Squadstack’s calls start with a “Ram Ramji” greeting, which does not adhere to religious inclusivity. Given India’s rich diversity of cultures and faiths, it is essential for businesses to adopt neutral and inclusive greetings.
Challenges
Voice AI in India faces key challenges, including accent variability due to linguistic diversity, which makes it hard for models to handle regional dialects. Network lag in rural areas can also lead to dropped calls or misinterpretations.
Hunar’s Voice Activity Detection system helps resolve latency issues in telephony, utilising servers in India for regulatory compliance and language models located in the US, said Khandelwal.
He added, “we created configurations and trained call recordings to analyse communication patterns across different regions. We assessed round-trip latency and explored the effective use of filler words.”
By enabling meaningful conversations in local languages, AI agents are digitising recruitment. And for millions of job seekers in India’s traditional sectors, that means the most productive recruiter they’ll ever meet may not be a person, but a voice.
The post Hello, AI speaking: Hiring Goes Vernacular With Voice AI appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.
