India’s Sarvam wants to bring its AI models to feature phones, cars and smart glasses

Indian AI company Sarvam plans to bring its newly released AI models to users by deploying them on Nokia feature phones, cars and its own smart glasses.

The company, backed by the likes of Lightspeed, PeakXV, and Khosla Ventures, said at the ongoing India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi that it is using edge models that take up only megabytes of space, can run on most phones with existing processors, and can work offline.

The company is teaming up with HMD to bring a conversational AI assistant to Nokia and HMD phones. A video demo showed a user clicking a dedicated AI button on a feature phone to converse with an AI assistant in a local language to get guidance on government schemes or local markets. It is not clear if all the AI features showcased at the event will work offline.

“Through edge AI, we want to bring intelligence to every phone, laptop, car, and even a new generation of devices,” Tushar Goswamy, head of Edge AI at Sarvam, said during a presentation.

He said that the company has worked with Qualcomm to tune its models for the latter’s chipsets. Sarvam didn’t provide details on which devices the models will be deployed to. Qualcomm said that it is developing a “Sovereign AI Experience Suite” that would work across a range of devices, including phones, PCs, laptops, cars, and IoT devices.

“Our collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies can accelerate how we take sovereign AI from research to deployment,” Sarvam co-founder and CEO Vivek Raghwan said in a statement.

“This will allow Sarvam to design models and applications that run closer to the edge, safeguard data, and are ready for adoption, at scale.”

Sarvam also said it is working with German engineering giant Bosch to bring AI assistants to cars, though it didn’t disclose many other details.

The startup also showed off a pair of AI smart-glasses, dubbed Sarvam Kaze, designed and manufactured in India. The company’s co-founder, Pratyush Kumar, said the glasses are a “builders’ device” and will be available in May.

Sarvam has so far operated largely in the enterprise market, offering its voice-focused models for use cases like customer support. The new models and partnerships indicate the company is shifting its focus towards consumer use cases.