Why an Indian Startup’s AI Performed Better Than Gemini & OpenAI on Indian Language Tasks |
A bank form printed in English, filled partly in Hindi. A property paper with stamps and smudges. A school circular typed in Marathi with an address in Roman letters. A scanned bill that has been photocopied twice.
These documents carry daily life in India. They also carry small hurdles for technology, especially when scripts mix on the same page, scans come in low resolution, and handwriting slips into the margins. Teams building language technology in India have started treating this as a practical design challenge, rather than a corner case.
One company working in this direction is Sarvam AI, a Bengaluru-based startup founded in August 2023 by Dr Vivek Raghavan and Dr Pratyush Kumar.
Sarvam describes its approach as part of the “sovereign AI” conversation, which usually refers to building AI capabilities within a country’s own ecosystem, with local control over infrastructure and choices.
For a reader, the idea becomes easier to hold when it is framed around everyday interactions:
How language-first AI helps
digitising scanned forms and notices across Indian scripts
extracting information from documents that mix scripts and layouts
generating speech in Indian languages for voice-based services
This is not one neat problem. India has 22 scheduled languages, many scripts, and a strong culture of code-mixing, including Hinglish (Hindi-English mix) and similar blends across regions.
Many digital services still depend on human effort to read documents, check details, and correct errors. That work shows up in banks, schools, clinics,........