ElevenLabs partners with Karnataka government to expand voice AI in Kannada

Voice technology company ElevenLabs has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Karnataka government to roll out voice artificial intelligence tools across state services in Kannada.

The agreement was signed in Bengaluru by ElevenLabs co-founder and chief executive Mati Staniszewski and Karnataka Information Technology Minister Priyank Kharge. The state's technology nodal body, the Karnataka Innovation and Technology Society (KITS), will oversee the rollout.

Under the partnership, the state plans to use conversational voice models to handle citizen inquiries, manage grievance redressal, and deliver vocational skilling programmes. The project also covers work on responsible AI deployment and speech restoration.

Growth in regional languages

India has grown into ElevenLabs' second-largest market outside the United States. According to the company, businesses in India logged roughly 100 million conversations through its ElevenAgents platform over the past year. More than 70 per cent of those interactions took place in regional languages, primarily Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu.

The company also stated that more than 25,000 Indian developers and firms now build applications using its programming interface each month, a figure that has increased two-and-a-half times over the past twelve months.

Staniszewski said the company is moving past basic synthetic voice generation towards automated conversational agents capable of following instructions and completing real-world tasks in local dialects.

Restoring lost voices

Alongside public administrative services, the initiative involves ElevenLabs' accessibility programme, which aims to recreate synthetic voices for people who have lost their ability to speak due to medical conditions.

The company has pledged globally to recreate one million voices for patients affected by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), throat cancer, cerebral palsy, and multiple sclerosis.

In India, ElevenLabs is working with patient advocacy groups and charities, including the ALS Care and Support Foundation, the Organisation for Rare Diseases India, the Nipman Foundation, The Quantum Hub, and Yes, We Can. The company said it has already provided free access to its technology to more than 75 non-profit organisations across the country.

At the event in Bengaluru, former radio and entertainment professional Sapna Rana, who lost her voice after being diagnosed with ALS, demonstrated how voice cloning software allowed her to produce speech again using historical audio recordings.