India's Sarvam wants to bring its AI models to feature phones, cars and smart glasses | TechCrunch
Summary
Indian AI company Sarvam aims to deploy its edge AI models on feature phones, cars, and smart glasses, enhancing accessibility and offline functionality.
Why It Matters
Sarvam's initiative highlights a significant shift towards making AI technology more accessible to everyday consumers, especially in emerging markets. By utilizing edge models that require minimal processing power, the company aims to bridge the digital divide and enable users to leverage AI for practical applications, such as accessing government services in local languages. This move could influence the future of AI deployment in low-resource environments.
Key Takeaways
- Sarvam is focusing on deploying AI models on low-resource devices like feature phones and cars.
- The company collaborates with Qualcomm and Bosch to enhance AI capabilities across various platforms.
- Sarvam's shift towards consumer applications marks a significant change from its previous enterprise-focused model.
- The AI models are designed to operate offline, making them more accessible in areas with limited internet connectivity.
- The introduction of smart glasses indicates Sarvam's ambition to innovate in the consumer electronics space.
Indian AI company Sarvam plans to bring its newly released AI models to users by deploying them on Nokia feature phones, cars and its own smart glasses. The company, backed by the likes of Lightspeed, PeakXV, and Khosla Ventures, said at the ongoing India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi that it is using edge models that take up only megabytes of space, can run on most phones with existing processors, and can work offline. The company is teaming up with HMD to bring a conversational AI assistant to Nokia and HMD phones. A video demo showed a user clicking a dedicated AI button on a feature phone to converse with an AI assistant in a local language to get guidance on government schemes or local markets. It is not clear if all the AI features showcased at the event will work offline. “Through edge AI, we want to bring intelligence to every phone, laptop, car, and even a new generation of devices,” Tushar Goswamy, head of Edge AI at Sarvam, said during a presentation. He said that the company has worked with Qualcomm to tune its models for the latter’s chipsets. Sarvam didn’t provide details on which devices the models will be deployed to. Qualcomm said that it is developing a “Sovereign AI Experience Suite” that would work across a range of devices, including phones, PCs, laptops, cars, and IoT devices. “Our collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies can accelerate how we take sovereign AI from research to deployment,” Sarvam co-founder and CEO Vivek Raghwan said in a statement. ...
