Sarvam AI: India’s Own AI Platform for Indian Languages – Features, Models and How to Use It (2026)
A simple guide to Sarvam AI, India's homegrown AI platform for Indian languages, covering Indus, its open models, voice and translation APIs, pricing and uses.
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Sarvam AI is one of the most important names in India’s artificial intelligence story. While most popular chatbots are built abroad and trained mainly on English, this Bengaluru startup focuses on Indian languages, Indian voices and Indian use cases. Its tools can understand mixed Hinglish questions, speak in natural Indian accents, translate between Indian languages and read scanned documents in Indian scripts. This guide explains what the company offers, how its models work and how you can start using it today.
Table of Contents
What Is Sarvam AI?
Sarvam AI is an Indian AI company founded in 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, who earlier worked with AI4Bharat at IIT Madras. It is headquartered in Bengaluru and raised early funding from investors including Lightspeed, Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures. In 2025, the government selected it under the IndiaAI Mission to build an indigenous foundation model with access to government-supported computing power. This makes it a key part of India’s sovereign AI effort.
The company’s goal is simple: make AI work well for the hundreds of millions of Indians who are more comfortable in their own language than in English. Global chatbots often struggle with regional accents, local terms and code-mixed sentences. Sarvam AI trains its models on Indian data so they handle such inputs naturally. Businesses, government departments and developers use its tools to build voice assistants, customer support bots and document processing systems.
Sarvam AI Models
| Model or product | What it does |
|---|---|
| Sarvam-1 | Early Indic language model released in 2024 |
| Sarvam-M | Open model released in 2025 under Apache 2.0 |
| Sarvam-30B | Open model announced in February 2026 |
| Sarvam-105B | Larger mixture-of-experts open model with long context |
| Saaras | Speech-to-text for Indian languages |
| Bulbul | Text-to-speech with natural Indian voices |
| Sarvam Vision | Reads documents and scanned forms in Indian scripts |
At the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi in February 2026, the company announced Sarvam-30B and Sarvam-105B and later released them as open-source models under the Apache 2.0 licence. Developers can download the weights from Hugging Face and India’s AIKosh platform. Open models matter because Indian startups and researchers can build on them freely, run them on their own servers and keep sensitive data inside the country.
Indus: The Chat Experience
Indus is the conversational platform built on these models. A beta chat app based on Sarvam-105B was released in February 2026 for the web and mobile. You can ask questions in English, Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and other Indian languages, or mix them as people usually do in daily speech. It is good at answering questions about Indian topics, government services and local context. The company has also introduced Indus Cowork for teams, with research, data analysis and presentation features.
For everyday users, the biggest advantage of Sarvam AI is comfort. A farmer, shop owner or senior citizen can type or speak a question in their own language and get a reply that feels natural. Global tools are improving in Indian languages too, but a platform designed specifically for India often understands local phrasing better. Try the same question in both and compare the answers for your language.
Voice and Translation APIs
- Text to Speech: natural voices in 11 Indian languages
- Speech to Text: transcription across Indian languages, including code-mixed speech
- Translation: support for over 20 Indian languages plus English
- Document Digitisation: converts PDFs and images into structured data
- Playground: test models in the browser without setup
These APIs are the main reason businesses choose Sarvam AI. Banks and insurance firms use speech recognition for call centres, ed-tech platforms use text to speech for lessons in regional languages, and government projects use translation to publish information in many languages at once. Billing is in Indian rupees, which makes it simpler for Indian companies than paying for foreign services in dollars.
How to Start Using Sarvam AI
- Visit the official Sarvam AI website.
- Sign up with your email or Google account.
- Open the Playground to test chat, voice or translation.
- Try Indus for conversational questions in your language.
- Developers can create an API key from the dashboard.
- Check the pricing page for free credits and paid plans.
New users usually get free credits to experiment, and paid usage follows a pay-as-you-go model. Plans and limits can change, so always confirm current pricing on the official site. Developers can use the Python SDK to add Indian-language voice and text features to apps in a few lines of code. Non-technical users can simply use the chat interface without touching any code.
Strengths and Limitations
Sarvam AI shines in Indian languages, natural Indian voices, code-mixed speech and documents in Indian scripts. It also supports data sovereignty, which matters to government and regulated industries. However, for complex coding, advanced maths or very long English research tasks, global tools such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini may still perform better. Its ecosystem of plugins and community tutorials is also smaller. Many users combine Sarvam AI for Indian-language tasks with other AI writing tools for English content.
Who Should Use It?
Content creators making videos or podcasts in regional languages can use its voices for narration. Businesses can build WhatsApp and phone bots that speak to customers in Malayalam, Tamil or Hindi. Students can ask questions in their mother tongue. Developers building for Bharat can use the open models without heavy licensing costs. If your audience lives outside big English-speaking cities, Sarvam AI is worth testing seriously. For video projects, also see our guide to AI video editing tools.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Sarvam AI an Indian company?
Yes. It is a Bengaluru-based Indian AI company founded in 2023.
Is Sarvam AI free to use?
New users can start free with credits and the Playground; heavier or business use is paid.
Does Sarvam AI support Malayalam?
Yes. Malayalam is among the Indian languages supported across its chat, voice and translation tools.
Are Sarvam’s models open source?
Sarvam-M, Sarvam-30B and Sarvam-105B were released under the Apache 2.0 licence.
Conclusion
Sarvam AI brings powerful AI to Indian languages in a way few global tools do. With Indus for chat, open models for developers and strong voice, translation and document APIs, it is becoming a central part of India’s AI ecosystem. Try it for your own language today, compare it with other assistants and use whichever works best for each task. For prompt ideas, explore our ChatGPT prompts for students guide, which also works on many other chatbots.