Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday witnessed a live demonstration of indigenous Artificial Intelligence technology at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, as HMD India announced a strategic partnership with homegrown startup Sarvam AI.
The collaboration aims to integrate Sarvam’s AI-powered personal assistant into Nokia feature phones and HMD devices, bringing advanced AI capabilities to millions of users who don’t own smartphones. This marks a significant step toward making AI accessible to the masses, especially in a country where feature phones still have a substantial user base.
Ravi Kunwar, Vice President and CEO of HMD India and APAC, described the demonstration before the Prime Minister as a landmark moment in the company’s digital inclusion journey. He underlined that the partnership reflects HMD’s commitment to democratizing AI by delivering intuitive, localized experiences beyond the smartphone ecosystem.
The rollout of AI-enabled services across multiple feature phone models is planned in the coming months. At the summit, Sarvam AI showcased real-time speech recognition, translation, and text-to-speech features in 10 Indian languages on an HMD Nokia feature phone—all without internet connectivity, highlighting advances in on-device AI processing.
Sarvam’s technology, which was created under the IndiaAI Mission, focuses on linguistic diversity and culturally appropriate solutions. It makes it possible to access information in regional languages via speech and expands digital services to underprivileged groups.
