L-R : Prof. Mitesh Khapra, Co-Founder, AI4Bharat & Professor, IIT Madras, S. Krishnan, Secretary, MeitY, Government of India, Supriya Paul, Co-Founder, Josh Talks AI and Shobhit Banga, Co-Founder, Josh Talks AI at the launch of Voice of India, India’s First Independent Multimodal AI Evaluation Platform
AI4Bharat, an initiative from IIT-Madras alongside Josh Talks AI has launched Voice of India, a multimodal AI Evaluation platform dedicated to evaluating AI systems against real-world Indian conditions.The platform will enable governments, enterprises, researchers and AI developers to independently assess how AI systems perform across Indian languages, accents, dialects and deployment environments.It was launched at an event in New Delhi in the presence of S. Krishnan, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.Rather than relying solely on performance metrics or benchmarks developed for Western contexts, the platform provides scientifically rigorous, India-specific evaluations that reflect how AI is actually used across the country, a statement from the parties, said.According to the joint statement, the Voice of India AI Evaluation Platform will be a new layer in India’s AI ecosystem building on top of AI models, compute infrastructure and language technologies. It will evaluate models across voice, speech translation, long-document processing, including accuracy, cultural appropriateness across Indian languages and legal reasoning. Robust evaluation“With AI systems becoming more deeply integrated into society, rigorous evaluation becomes as important as model development itself. Through Voice of India, we hope to provide the research community, industry and policymakers with scientifically robust evaluation frameworks that reflect India’s linguistic diversity. India has a unique opportunity not only to build AI for the world, but also to help define how the world measures it,” said Mitesh Khapra, AI4Bharat, IIT Madras.“The next frontier in AI isn’t building larger models. It’s building better ways to measure whether they actually work. The Voice of India AI Evaluation Platform aims to create independent, transparent evaluation infrastructure that helps AI builders understand where models succeed, where they fail and why,” Shobhit Banga, Co-Founder, Josh Talks AI.Published on August 4, 2026
