Shunya Labs, a Nasscom GenAI Cohort 1 startup, has announced the launch of Vāķ, India’s largest open-weight voice AI release, unveiled in partnership with Nasscom at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi. A real-time translation system spanning all 2,970 language pairs across India’s 55 mother tongues, Vāķ is accompanied by the world’s #1-ranked open-weight speech recognition model and a neural text-to-speech engine, all released simultaneously and all free to deploy.
In a country of 1.4 billion people with over a thousand language varieties including 61 languages spoken by more than a million people, speech AI systems that support only 5–10 Indian languages are simply inadequate. This limited coverage has compelled Indian developers, startups, and government institutions to rely on foreign APIs and overseas servers, placing citizen voice data under external terms while leaving vast linguistic communities underserved. Additionally, many Indian languages are not mutually intelligible, even within the same language family, making genuine linguistic inclusion far more complex than superficial multi-language support. As a result, major speech communities such as Bhojpuri, Rajasthani, Chhattisgarhi, and Magahi each spoken by tens of millions have remained largely excluded from mainstream AI systems. Vāķ is designed to close this structural gap by delivering comprehensive, real-time, and sovereign language coverage aligned with the full depth and diversity of India’s linguistic landscape.
At its core, Vāķ is a real-time Any-to-Any Translation system that converts speech in any of India’s 55 languages into any of the other 54, instantly, with end-to-end latency under 1.5 seconds. But it does more than merely translate words; it preserves the speaker’s voice, their tone, and their emotions across languages. Additionally, its Zero-shot voice cloning means that no prior training data is needed.
The name Vāķ itself carries deep resonance, representing the power of speech in ancient Vedic thought. It’s the force that transforms thought into expression and gives voice to knowledge itself, and one of the oldest and most revered concepts in Sanskrit tradition. Shunya Labs’ choice of the name reflects how Vāķ is a technology that is rooted in India’s own intellectual heritage. With complete model weights publicly available for download and local deployment, any organisation can run Vāķ on its own infrastructure with no data leaving its environment.
The release comprises three simultaneously launched model families. Pingala ASR holds the #1 rank on the Hugging Face OpenASR Leaderboard, a globally recognised, third-party benchmark achieving a Word Error Rate of 3.10%, the lowest ever recorded, with a CPU-first architecture delivering sub-250ms latency for edge and offline deployment. Vāķ’s neutral TTS delivers natural-sounding output across all 55 languages with streaming capability, custom voice creation, zero-shot voice cloning, and prosody and emotion control. Real-Time Any-to-Any Translation enables translation across all 2,970 language pairs (55 × 54), preserving the speaker’s voice and emotional register, and end-to-end latency under 1.5 seconds.
It’s these first-of-its-kind features that give Vāķ its edge. Vāķ gives any organisation the freedom to deploy entirely on their own infrastructure without calls to foreign servers, or citizen voice data leaving the country, no recurring API costs, and no dependency. For government agencies, hospitals reaching rural patients, and courts delivering justice in local languages, sovereign deployment is the foundation. With Vāķ, the full set of 2,970 translation pairs is available out of the box, making cross-linguistic citizen services, healthcare outreach, judicial access, and educational delivery technically and economically viable for the first time at a national scale.
Commenting on the launch, Sourav Bandyopadhyay, Founder & Chief Scientist, Shunya Labs, said, “India does not need to depend on foreign APIs to hear its own people. With Vāķ, we are releasing the world’s best-performing open-weight Voice AI across 55 distinct Indian tongues, that is, every language with over a million speakers. This is sovereign, self-funded innovation built within the Nasscom ecosystem. Our vision is simple: every developer can build, every government can deploy, and every Indian can be heard in their own language.”
Adding to this, Ankit Bose, Head of AI, Nasscom, said, “Shunya Labs, as a Nasscom GenAI Cohort 1 startup, exemplifies the kind of globally competitive innovation emerging from India’s AI ecosystem. Building high-performance, open-weight models across Indian languages reflects both technical excellence and a commitment to sovereign, inclusive AI. The introduction of Vāķ reinforces the role of the Nasscom GenAI ecosystem in enabling startups to innovate at global standards while contributing meaningfully to India’s digital future.”
Vāķ’s coverage spans India’s full linguistic landscape: 43 Indo-Aryan languages including Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Urdu, Bhojpuri, and Rajasthani; seven Dravidian languages including Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam; three Sino-Tibetan languages including Meitei (Manipuri), Bodo, and Garo; one Austroasiatic language, Santali; and Indian English, reaching over 1.17 billion native speakers in aggregate. The launch of Vāķ also aligns with the IndiaAI Mission, Digital India, BHASHINI, and Atmanirbhar Bharat.
