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The Digital India BHASHINI Division has launched policy recommendations along with the developers’ toolkit on voice technologies at the India AI Summit Expo — aiming to establish a “voice-first” digital public infrastructure. Developed collaboratively by ARTPARK @IISc, Digital Futures Lab, and Trilegal, these resources provide a roadmap for building inclusive and responsible speech AI that bridges language and literacy divides at population scale.
The Policy Report Building an Open and Responsible Voice Technology Ecosystem advocates for treating foundational speech datasets as Digital Public Goods and proposes targeted investments in sustainable public infrastructure to prevent exclusionary outcomes in the emerging voice economy.
Central to this transition is the launch of VoicERA, an open-source, end-to-end Voice AI stack integrated with the BHASHINI platform, which allows government departments to rapidly onboard voice-enabled services—such as agriculture advisories and grievance redressal—without reconstructing entire technology stacks.
Key Pillars for a Responsible Voice Ecosystem
Voice as Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI): Establishing speech technology as a foundational layer to overcome literacy barriers and enable inclusive access to the State.
Data Representation & Quality: Addressing structural gaps in Indian-language datasets by ensuring diverse and representative data collection that captures regional linguistic nuances.
Responsible AI (RAI) Lifecycle: Embedding legal and ethical guardrails—including compliance with the DPDP Act, 2023—throughout the development, deployment, and evaluation stages.
Open & Interoperable Stack: Utilizing the VoicERA stack to create pluggable, cloud-deployable systems that foster sovereign AI capabilities and reduce vendor lock-in.
Equitable Market Integration: Supporting a multi-stakeholder ecosystem where innovators can build on a shared national foundation to ensure the “commanding heights” of the voice economy remain democratically governed.
Building an Open and Responsible Voice Technology Ecosystem: Policy Recommendations for Digital Inclusion in India
This report identifies critical barriers to entry, such as the high cost of collecting diverse audio data and the concentration of high-quality models among a few global actors. It argues that for India to achieve “Voice Sovereignty,” it must move beyond isolated “application islands” toward a dense network of open-source datasets and models. The report recommends a layered governance approach that balances the need for open innovation with stringent data protection standards, ensuring that voice technology serves as a tool for dignity and empowerment rather than surveillance or exclusion.
Indic Voice Technologies: Toolkit for Developers
This toolkit complements the policy framework by providing a layered, lifecycle-oriented approach for engineers building voice applications in Indic languages. It offers practical strategies for managing accent variations, improving signal-to-noise ratios in field-collected data, and utilizing domain-adaptive pretraining to enhance model generalization across India’s immense linguistic diversity.
Policy Relevance
For India, these launches represent a transition from “Text-Based Governance” to “Voice-Natural Interfaces,” effectively bypassing the literacy barrier for millions of citizens.
Standardizing “Voice DPI”: Integrating VoicERA with BHASHINI acts as a “Standard Maker” move, providing a sovereign, execution-ready stack that ensures India “owns its voice” in the AI era.
Bypassing the Digital Divide: By making voice the primary interface for Bharat, the government ensures that scheme discovery and citizen feedback are accessible even to those with limited digital literacy.
Operationalizing the DPDP Act: The toolkit’s emphasis on embedded RAI practices ensures that the development of voice AI is inherently compliant with India’s evolving data privacy rules.
Federal Multilingual Scaling: Enabling departments to onboard voice services at population scale ensures that agriculture advisories and livelihood services reach the last mile in regional dialects.
Implementation Fidelity via Open Infrastructure: Treating foundational datasets as Digital Public Goods ensures that innovation remains inclusive and not restricted to leading innovation leaders.
Relevant Question for Policy Stakeholders: What institutional mechanisms are needed to incentivize private innovators to contribute their anonymized speech data back to the national pool of Digital Public Goods?
Follow the full update here: : Advancing Inclusive Voice Technologies in India - February 21, 2026
Building an Open and Responsible Voice Technology Ecosystem
Indic Voice Technologies For An Inclusive Digital India