OpenAI plans Hindi-tuned voice model | India Business News

Vijaye Raji, OpenAI’s chief technology officer of applications

Bengaluru: OpenAI will roll out a Hindi-tuned voice model for ChatGPT and is exploring a differentiated experience tailored to India’s languages, Android phones and intermittent internet connectivity as it seeks to expand adoption in the country.Vijaye Raji, OpenAI’s chief technology officer of applications, said India’s preference for voice interactions was shaping its product priorities. “To be accessible and used in India, we need to focus on voice,” Raji said on the sidelines of the AI giant’s developer event in Bengaluru.Raji grew up in Puducherry and moved to the US around 25 years ago. He spent nearly two decades at Microsoft and Facebook before founding Statsig, a platform that helps companies test and improve their products. He joined OpenAI following its acquisition of Statsig in 2025 and now oversees product engineering for ChatGPT and Codex.The company said its upcoming GPT-Live 1.1 would initially roll out in the ChatGPT app with two native Hindi voices designed to make conversations sound more natural. Raji described it as a Hindi-tuned model, distinguishing it from ChatGPT’s existing ability to converse in Indian languages.“One of the things I want to explore is a differentiated experience for India,” he said. “This is an Android-first market. We want to be able to take the native Android experiences and build that into the product.”Raji said teams were learning from users who mix Hindi and English within the same session and use voice notes. Ensuring products remain reliable when internet connectivity is intermittent is another consideration. “It’s not enough that we build all these capable products. We want to make them usable,” he said.OpenAI executives said the number of people using ChatGPT in India had doubled from a year earlier, though they did not disclose the current user base. Raji said he expected further growth and investment in the country.Raji, who oversees advertising and growth alongside the technology underpinning ChatGPT and Codex, said advertising helps fund free access and support wider adoption.“We want to grow, and growth comes from providing affordable and accessible services,” he said. OpenAI recently introduced advertising in India, giving businesses another way to reach users through the platform.Raji said the company had priced its lower-cost ChatGPT Go subscription specifically for India rather than simply converting dollar prices into rupees. The plan aims to lower the cost of accessing more capable models. Education is among the major uses of ChatGPT in India, company executives have said.OpenAI is also seeking to connect its consumer, enterprise and developer businesses. Raji said developers could use ChatGPT to reach its audience, while enterprises were deploying the company’s technology in services such as customer support and voice agents.Expanding support for Indian languages will depend partly on access to training data, Raji said. OpenAI’s data teams work with partners to obtain properly licensed content for model training, he added.