Glossary

Voice AI

Voice AI is the umbrella term for AI that understands and generates human speech in real time — powering voice assistants, phone agents and translation.

All terms

Definition

Voice AI is the category of artificial intelligence that understands and generates human speech. It combines automatic speech recognition (ASR / STT), natural language understanding via large language models, and text-to-speech synthesis to enable real-time spoken interactions between humans and machines. Voice AI powers phone agents, smart speakers, in-car assistants, voice chatbots, real-time translation and accessibility tools.

Voice AIGlossary

1Voice AI agent definition

2Voice AI stack

3All 22 scheduled Indian languages

Voice AI vs chat AI vs generative AI

Voice AI is a subset of AI that adds spoken input and output to what chat AI already does. A chat AI agent and a voice AI agent can share the same LLM and tools — the only difference is that voice AI adds STT on the input and TTS on the output, with a much stricter latency budget.

Real-time vs batch voice AI

Real-time voice AI (phone agents, voice assistants) has to respond within a few hundred milliseconds. Batch voice AI (call transcription, voicemail summarization, podcast indexing) can take seconds or minutes and optimizes for accuracy instead.

India-specific considerations

Voice AI in India has to handle 22 scheduled languages, code-switching (especially Hinglish), regional accents, and cost sensitivity. Not every global voice AI provider handles Indian languages at production quality — opinionated routing to Indic-specialized providers (like Sarvam) meaningfully outperforms a generic multilingual model for Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Bengali.