Sarvam AI has unveiled Bulbul, a new speech AI model that supports 11 Indian languages with natural, region-specific accents. It offers authentic, human-like voice interactions.
“Natural, familiar speech in 11 Indian languages, with authentic accents that sound just like India,” said Sarvam AI in their announcement. Bulbul’s focus is to provide voice interactions that are “Not robotic. Not rehearsed. Just real.” The system promises lightning-fast performance and custom voices for brands, enhancing user experience with custom solutions.
The first version of Bulbul, called Bulbul v1, was released last year in August and featured six distinct voices, each designed to cater to a wide range of communication needs across various industries and contexts.
Sarvam AI was recently selected by the Government of India under the IndiaAI Mission to develop India’s sovereign Large Language Model (LLM) as part of the effort to create indigenous AI capabilities.
The company recently demonstrated its capabilities by translating high-profile content, including the Lex Fridman podcast featuring Prime Minister Narendra Modi, into nine Indian languages
Announcing the development, Sarvam AI said, “Building India’s sovereign model from the ground up is a crucial step toward Atmanirbhar Bharat.” The model will be designed to be fluent in Indian languages, optimised for voice, capable of reasoning, and ready for secure, population-scale deployment.
Sarvam AI has proposed the development of a 70-billion parameter multimodal AI model that supports both Indian languages and English, and work on it has already begun. The start-up, selected from 67 applicants, will receive government support in the form of compute resources to build the model from scratch.
Founded in 2023 by Dr. Vivek Raghavan and Dr. Pratyush Kumar, both veterans in AI research, public infrastructure, and large-scale systems, the Bengaluru-based company is backed by Lightspeed, Peak XV Partners, and Khosla Ventures.
The post Sarvam AI Launches Bulbul, New Voice Model for Indian Market appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.
