Powering India’s new generation of voice AI agents

For years, talking to machines was science fiction. In 2025, it’s a developer primitive.

Breakthroughs in low-latency inference, emotional realism, and full-duplex audio have made natural, two-way voice interaction viable at scale. According to a16z’s 2025 Voice Agents update, these advances are turning speech into the new standard interface for AI.

For India - a nation of 22 official languages, vast customer-contact industries, and a billion smartphone users - this convergence of global capability and local necessity has made voice the most inclusive and intuitive medium for automation.

Beneath this shift runs a single constant: infrastructure. We’re proud to provide the voice layer powering India’s growing class of AI builders - companies developing conversational interfaces that will define how India speaks to technology.

The lay of the land: India’s voice-AI landscape

India’s voice ecosystem now spans three interconnected layers - applications, platforms, and infrastructure - each enabling the next.

At the top, startups are building domain-specific voice agents for CX, BFSI, recruitment, and healthcare. In the middle, platforms handle orchestration, analytics, and telephony. Beneath them all lies the foundational speech layer that gives these agents their voice.

The infrastructure layer: where differentiation happens

As the stack matures, competitive advantage has shifted downstream. The voice layer has become the performance layer – small improvements in expressiveness, latency, or language coverage translate into measurable gains in user engagement and trust.

Indian builders choose ElevenLabs for six performance dimensions that directly affect real-world outcomes:

• Expressiveness: Voices that convey tone, empathy, and intent - essential for multilingual customer support and collections.
  
• Accent and tone diversity: Through the ElevenLabs Voice Marketplace, startups can access more than 10,000 unique voices, selecting accents and tones tailored to specific audiences or use cases - from conversational for support, to assertive for collections, to instructional for tutoring and training.
  
• Latency: Real-time dialogue (<100 ms) that feels conversational rather than scripted.
  
• Language coverage: Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, and Hinglish voices that sound native, not translated.
  
• Customization: The ability to create proprietary voices - critical for brand identity and IP control.
  
• Scalability: Enterprise-grade streaming infrastructure supporting millions of concurrent calls.

Together, these capabilities make ElevenLabs’ APIs a shared voice backbone for India’s new generation of AI startups - powering applications from automated sales agents to multilingual patient schedulers.

From infrastructure to platform: ElevenLabs Agents

On top of this infrastructure, we now offer ElevenLabs Agents – a full-stack environment for building and deploying voice agents without complex orchestration.

Companies such as Cars24, Razorpay, and Unacademy use ElevenLabs Agents to create domain-specific assistants that autonomously manage customer conversations, verification, and onboarding.

This marks a natural progression: from providing the voice itself to enabling complete voice-native applications.

Where value is being created

Across industries, adoption is clustering around a few dominant patterns:

These clusters drive vertical solutions across recruitment (Apna's BlueMachine, Berribot), healthcare (VoiceStack by CareStack), banking and financial services (GreyLabs, Ori, Skit AI, Awaaz De), and commerce (Nurix, Vodex) – all built on the same voice infrastructure.

Alongside these vertical builders, horizontal platforms such as ElevenLabs Agents span multiple use cases, offering a unified environment for creating, deploying, and managing voice agents across industries.

The opportunity ahead

Voice is fast becoming India’s digital operating layer - the bridge between massive customer demand and scalable automation.

AI agents that succeed here won’t just sound better; they’ll feel more human, more local, and more trustworthy. Beneath this transformation is a single connective fabric: the voice infrastructure that enables every Indian AI agent to speak naturally to the world.

Whether you’re building full-stack agent use cases or developing domain-specific applications, contact us to explore how ElevenLabs can power your next generation of voice experiences.