Finnish phone maker HMD today launched its first smartphone, called the Vibe 2 5G, which comes preloaded with Indian AI company Sarvam’s chatbot Indus. Both companies had first announced the partnership during the India AI summit held in New Delhi in February.
The Indus app is powered by Sarvam’s locally trained 105-billion-parameter model — a measure of the AI’s scale and sophistication — and launched at the AI summit. The app supports 22 Indic languages and mid-sentence code-switching (the ability to fluidly mix languages mid-conversation, like switching between Hindi and English), which helps the assistant better understand the context of a query. Currently, the application doesn’t support offline usage, and it doesn’t have any integrated feature with the device to invoke the AI assistant through a shortcut.
The partnership is a potential testing ground for both companies to gauge the appetite for an India-focused chatbot.
“With this partnership, the first thing we want to do is get the Indus app to consumers,” said Ravi Kunwar, HMD’s CEO and Vice President for India and APAC, in an interview with TechCrunch. “Once they start using it, we will move to phase two to focus on driving more traction and stickiness. Right now, by pre-loading the app, we want to be more accessible to users,” he said.
