<p>Bengaluru: Voice AI is here. From startups to tech giants, every company is now making use of voice-enabled solutions that allow anyone to communicate with ease. With hands-free interaction, gradually sectors such as BFSI, telecom and retail are finding new ways to adopt voice AI.</p>.<p>Last week, Swiggy and Razorpay announced their partnership with Sarvam AI. This partnership with Swiggy will bring multilingual, voice-led commerce to Food Delivery, Instamart and Dineout. Through this, users can place food and grocery in their preferred language by speaking to an AI Assistant. Razorpay will power secure agentic payments via UPI Reserve Pay, for conversational AI journeys.</p>.<p>Companies are now looking forward to the next phase of digital commerce, where conversations will become the interface. Last week, Meesho announced ‘Vaani — Your Meesho Dost’, which is a GenAI-powered conversational voice shopping assistant.</p>.<p>AI experts said voice AI is the most-important technology today, because it is becoming the most natural interface for humans and technology. “Over 82% of enterprises are already using voice-enabled solutions and the value of the voice assistant market is estimated to be $6.13 billion by 2026 (31% CAGR). This is leading to a shift from screen-first experiences to conversation-first experiences. In addition, nearly 40% of AI systems are multimodal, which means that they use multiple forms of input (i.e. voice, text and visual) in a unified digital experience,” Kumar Rajagopalan, Vice-President — Strategic Initiatives and Country Head, India at Dexian, said.</p>.<p>He added that the benefits of voice AI are clear as it reduces friction, provides improved accessibility and allows for real-time hands-free interaction. The BFSI, healthcare, retail, telecom and customer service sectors are all leading the way in the adoption of voice AI. For example, financial services is using voice AI for secure authentication and faster customer resolution, and healthcare is leveraging the same for clinical documentation and patient engagement. The overall voice AI landscape is also continuing to expand rapidly, with estimates suggesting that the global market will grow to tens of billions of dollars within the next decade, Rajagopalan added.</p>.<p>Many startups are also now focusing on voice AI. With many dialects and languages in India, voice AI provides multilingual support across verticals. Recently, at an event organised by EkStep Foundation, Nandan Nilekani, its co-founder and chairperson, said everybody will use voice AI as a utility to improve things, and then “we’ll share learning”.</p>.<p>Voice is a whole new frontier, simply because there’s so much variation, so many dialects. “We speak English or English words liberally between languages that AI should deal with and be able to comprehend and answer,” he added.</p>.<p>Recently, at the second edition of the ConvoZen AI Summit 2026, Akhil Gupta, Founder of NoBroker and ConvoZen, explained how voice AI is slowly becoming the next UPI revolution in India, with its ability to reach and communicate with Indians in different dialects.</p>.<p>“For a country like ours, where the majority of the population resides in rural areas, voice-based communication can open a door to commerce that has been closed shut for a long time. The issue has been scalability. There are only so many human agents you can hire to handle calls — but with AI, scalability is no longer an issue. Indians, whether they’re living in a metro or a remote village, can access services of any brand just by dialling a number, instead of having to navigate a complex web UI,” Anurag Jain, Founder and CEO of Oriserve, said.</p>.<p>Voice AI has been a talking point for a while, but the recent advancements in AI tech [lower latency, lower Word Error Rate (WER), etc.] have now made it possible for it to be deployed at scale and we are seeing great use cases in collections, customer support, and raising installation requests and online shopping to name a few, he added.</p>.<p>What excites Abhinandan Jain, Chief — CX, Growth & Delivery Officer, AIONOS, is that we are finally building technology that understands not just what someone says, but how they feel saying it. “The contact centre industry spent 30 years optimising for speed. The next 10 are about depth. Voice AI is the engine that gets us there,” he said.</p>.<p>Explaining sectors that will be most benefited, he said, banking moves the fastest because voice biometrics solve in two seconds what passwords couldn’t solve in 30 years.</p>.<p>Apart from banking, healthcare, retail, telecom and education are also seeing accelerated use of voice AI. “The common thread is this: people want to feel like someone is actually there. Voice AI, built right, delivers that at a scale no human workforce alone ever could,” he said.</p>.<p>Many startups apart from Gnani.ai and Sarvam AI are revolutionising and rapidly advancing in voice AI. Y-Combinator-backed Bengaluru-based voice AI startup Bolna in January raised $6.3 million in a seed funding round. </p>.<p>Maitreya Wagh, Founder and CEO of Bolna, said, “Voice remains the most-critical channel for enterprises, but migrating from IVR or human-led workflows to voice AI is a long and complex process. Most companies still have to wait weeks for custom-built agents. Our focus is on enabling enterprises to build, test, deploy, and monitor voice AI agents on their own, at scale.”</p>.<p>Another Bengaluru-based voice AI startup, Arrowhead, raised $3 million, and it plans to scale voice AI for financial services. Tech giants such as Google and Amazon are also investing in voice AI.</p>.<p><strong>Security still a major concern</strong></p>.<p>The security of voice biometrics is estimated to reach $3.61 billion in 2026 and will grow at an average CAGR of approximately 26% per year, so enterprises are making voice authentication a priority, Rajagopalan said. Companies must implement multi-factor authentication, liveness detection, anti-spoofing AI models and encryption of voice data. As deepfake audio threats increase, combining voice with behaviour and device-based signals will be essential for creating trust and resiliency within voice-first ecosystems.</p>.<p>Jain said voice AI has evolved from a convenience feature to a critical defence layer against sophisticated fraud — deepfake attempts have surged over 1,300% in 2024 alone, and this technology is on the frontlines of that battle.</p>.<p>Voice AI can offer multi-layered protection: instant caller verification through voice biometrics, real-time deepfake detection, and proactive threat identification without disrupting user experience. Voice AI tools can integrate with existing security infrastructure — from surveillance systems to access controls — creating unified networks that respond faster than human teams ever could. It’s enabling enterprises to scale their security posture without scaling their headcount, he added.</p>
<p>Bengaluru: Voice AI is here. From startups to tech giants, every company is now making use of voice-enabled solutions that allow anyone to communicate with ease. With hands-free interaction, gradually sectors such as BFSI, telecom and retail are finding new ways to adopt voice AI.</p>.<p>Last week, Swiggy and Razorpay announced their partnership with Sarvam AI. This partnership with Swiggy will bring multilingual, voice-led commerce to Food Delivery, Instamart and Dineout. Through this, users can place food and grocery in their preferred language by speaking to an AI Assistant. Razorpay will power secure agentic payments via UPI Reserve Pay, for conversational AI journeys.</p>.<p>Companies are now looking forward to the next phase of digital commerce, where conversations will become the interface. Last week, Meesho announced ‘Vaani — Your Meesho Dost’, which is a GenAI-powered conversational voice shopping assistant.</p>.<p>AI experts said voice AI is the most-important technology today, because it is becoming the most natural interface for humans and technology. “Over 82% of enterprises are already using voice-enabled solutions and the value of the voice assistant market is estimated to be $6.13 billion by 2026 (31% CAGR). This is leading to a shift from screen-first experiences to conversation-first experiences. In addition, nearly 40% of AI systems are multimodal, which means that they use multiple forms of input (i.e. voice, text and visual) in a unified digital experience,” Kumar Rajagopalan, Vice-President — Strategic Initiatives and Country Head, India at Dexian, said.</p>.<p>He added that the benefits of voice AI are clear as it reduces friction, provides improved accessibility and allows for real-time hands-free interaction. The BFSI, healthcare, retail, telecom and customer service sectors are all leading the way in the adoption of voice AI. For example, financial services is using voice AI for secure authentication and faster customer resolution, and healthcare is leveraging the same for clinical documentation and patient engagement. The overall voice AI landscape is also continuing to expand rapidly, with estimates suggesting that the global market will grow to tens of billions of dollars within the next decade, Rajagopalan added.</p>.<p>Many startups are also now focusing on voice AI. With many dialects and languages in India, voice AI provides multilingual support across verticals. Recently, at an event organised by EkStep Foundation, Nandan Nilekani, its co-founder and chairperson, said everybody will use voice AI as a utility to improve things, and then “we’ll share learning”.</p>.<p>Voice is a whole new frontier, simply because there’s so much variation, so many dialects. “We speak English or English words liberally between languages that AI should deal with and be able to comprehend and answer,” he added.</p>.<p>Recently, at the second edition of the ConvoZen AI Summit 2026, Akhil Gupta, Founder of NoBroker and ConvoZen, explained how voice AI is slowly becoming the next UPI revolution in India, with its ability to reach and communicate with Indians in different dialects.</p>.<p>“For a country like ours, where the majority of the population resides in rural areas, voice-based communication can open a door to commerce that has been closed shut for a long time. The issue has been scalability. There are only so many human agents you can hire to handle calls — but with AI, scalability is no longer an issue. Indians, whether they’re living in a metro or a remote village, can access services of any brand just by dialling a number, instead of having to navigate a complex web UI,” Anurag Jain, Founder and CEO of Oriserve, said.</p>.<p>Voice AI has been a talking point for a while, but the recent advancements in AI tech [lower latency, lower Word Error Rate (WER), etc.] have now made it possible for it to be deployed at scale and we are seeing great use cases in collections, customer support, and raising installation requests and online shopping to name a few, he added.</p>.<p>What excites Abhinandan Jain, Chief — CX, Growth & Delivery Officer, AIONOS, is that we are finally building technology that understands not just what someone says, but how they feel saying it. “The contact centre industry spent 30 years optimising for speed. The next 10 are about depth. Voice AI is the engine that gets us there,” he said.</p>.<p>Explaining sectors that will be most benefited, he said, banking moves the fastest because voice biometrics solve in two seconds what passwords couldn’t solve in 30 years.</p>.<p>Apart from banking, healthcare, retail, telecom and education are also seeing accelerated use of voice AI. “The common thread is this: people want to feel like someone is actually there. Voice AI, built right, delivers that at a scale no human workforce alone ever could,” he said.</p>.<p>Many startups apart from Gnani.ai and Sarvam AI are revolutionising and rapidly advancing in voice AI. Y-Combinator-backed Bengaluru-based voice AI startup Bolna in January raised $6.3 million in a seed funding round. </p>.<p>Maitreya Wagh, Founder and CEO of Bolna, said, “Voice remains the most-critical channel for enterprises, but migrating from IVR or human-led workflows to voice AI is a long and complex process. Most companies still have to wait weeks for custom-built agents. Our focus is on enabling enterprises to build, test, deploy, and monitor voice AI agents on their own, at scale.”</p>.<p>Another Bengaluru-based voice AI startup, Arrowhead, raised $3 million, and it plans to scale voice AI for financial services. Tech giants such as Google and Amazon are also investing in voice AI.</p>.<p><strong>Security still a major concern</strong></p>.<p>The security of voice biometrics is estimated to reach $3.61 billion in 2026 and will grow at an average CAGR of approximately 26% per year, so enterprises are making voice authentication a priority, Rajagopalan said. Companies must implement multi-factor authentication, liveness detection, anti-spoofing AI models and encryption of voice data. As deepfake audio threats increase, combining voice with behaviour and device-based signals will be essential for creating trust and resiliency within voice-first ecosystems.</p>.<p>Jain said voice AI has evolved from a convenience feature to a critical defence layer against sophisticated fraud — deepfake attempts have surged over 1,300% in 2024 alone, and this technology is on the frontlines of that battle.</p>.<p>Voice AI can offer multi-layered protection: instant caller verification through voice biometrics, real-time deepfake detection, and proactive threat identification without disrupting user experience. Voice AI tools can integrate with existing security infrastructure — from surveillance systems to access controls — creating unified networks that respond faster than human teams ever could. It’s enabling enterprises to scale their security posture without scaling their headcount, he added.</p>