Microsoft partners with India’s Sarvam AI

Microsoft collaborates with India’s Sarvam AI

Microsoft has collaborated with Sarvam AI, an Indian startup specializing in generative AI for Indic languages, to make Sarvam’s voice-based language model available on Azure cloud platform. This partnership aims to advance AI innovation in India.

Microsoft seeks to leverage Sarvam’s expertise in developing customized AI models tailored for Indian languages by providing access to Azure’s AI capabilities. This allows Sarvam to efficiently build, deploy and scale its language model technology stack to developers and enterprises across India.

About the Microsoft & Sarvam AI Collaboration

As part of this collaboration, Sarvam aims to leverage Azure to build and deploy its proprietary voice-based language model, intended to provide a natural voice interface for generative AI.

Initially focused on developing Hindi voice interface, Sarvam plans to expand coverage to more Indian languages. It aims to ensure the voice model supports colloquial vocabularies used in daily conversations.

Benefits of Microsoft & Sarvam AI Collaboration

This partnership allows Sarvam to leverage Azure’s AI capabilities and infrastructure to efficiently build and deploy its voice-based language model stack. Azure services enable Sarvam to rapidly train, host and scale its niche generative AI models.

By making its voice model available on Azure, Sarvam empowers India-focused developers to build customizable voice-based AI applications at scale across sectors like education, healthcare, finance and customer service. It also enables Indian enterprises to swiftly integrate next-generation voice AI innovations. In short, this collaboration allows Sarvam to achieve quicker go-to-market and scale among technologists and businesses in India.

How Microsoft Supports Sarvam

Microsoft provides Sarvam access to cloud and AI capabilities like Azure OpenAI Service and Machine Learning. This infrastructure allows Sarvam to efficiently develop, train, host and scale its voice-based language models for developers and enterprises in India.

Additionally, Microsoft collaborates with Sarvam on research initiatives to enhance support for Indian languages in Microsoft’s own AI services, by leveraging Sarvam’s expertise. Azure’s advanced capabilities enable Sarvam to achieve faster scale across India’s technology landscape.

Significance for India’s AI

This collaboration establishes a foundation for India-focused developers to build custom voice-based AI applications using Sarvam’s speech models on Azure. It democratizes access to advanced voice AI capabilities tailored for India.

Availability of Sarvam’s locally-relevant voice AI solutions on Azure can accelerate adoption by enterprises, startups and public sector organizations across India. This partnership signals evolving synergies between global and India-centric AI players to co-create impactful advances in Indian language AI – heralding an AI-powered future for India.

About Sarvam AI

Sarvam AI aims to spearhead impactful research and development of generative AI innovations tailored for Indian languages and contexts. It raised significant venture funding – $41 million in Series A round in 2024. Sarvam AI’s founders have strong research pedigree, having previously developed AI solutions at IIT-Madras based lab AI4Bharat that seeded their entrepreneurial ambitions.

Applications of Voice Interface for Generative AI

Voice user interfaces allow wider access to advanced generative AI applications for India’s largely non-English speaking population across essential domains like education, finance, healthcare and agritech. However, training robust voice recognition models for regional Indian languages considering dialectal variations remains an ongoing challenge that startups like Sarvam AI aim to address through improved speech data sets and localization techniques, in collaboration with platforms like Microsoft Azure.