The Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD), under the Digital India Corporation (DIC) of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), launched VoicERA at the India AI Impact Summit 2026. The launch was led by Amitabh Nag, Chief Executive Officer of the Digital India BHASHINI Division, in collaboration with EkStep Foundation, COSS, IIIT Bengaluru and AI4Bharat. The initiative was presented as a major milestone in India’s Digital Public Infrastructure.

VoicERA is an open source, end to end voice artificial intelligence stack deployed on the BHASHINI National Language Infrastructure, serving as a national execution layer for multilingual voice and language AI. The platform has been designed to be open, pluggable, interoperable, cloud deployable and on premise ready, enabling secure and scalable deployment of voice systems across government departments, research institutions and innovation ecosystems. By modularising the voice stack the project seeks to reduce duplication of effort and remove vendor lock in.

The integration expands BHASHINI’s capabilities from translation and language technologies to real time speech systems, conversational AI and multilingual telephony at population scale. Departments are expected to rapidly onboard voice enabled citizen services across agriculture advisories, education support, livelihood services, grievance redressal, citizen feedback and scheme discovery. The design aims to support inclusive access and sovereign control over voice technologies.

Officials described the launch as the beginning of a new phase of Digital Public Infrastructure in which voice becomes a primary interface for citizens to engage with the State, emphasising dignity and access through a shared national foundation. Stakeholders noted that VoicERA is intended as a digital public good for voice, enabling interoperable execution ready deployment without the need to rebuild entire technology stacks. Live demonstrations are available at the BHASHINI Pavilion and at the EkStep Pavilion in Bharat Mandapam.