Dear friends,
Most AI systems today are built behind closed doors and trained on Western languages. Now the new frontier is embodied AI: glasses, robots, pencils, speakers… If these products are going to enter our homes and bodies, they need to be open, local, and multilingual so that they serve the world in all its diversity, not just a fraction of it.
At the India AI Summit, we launched Current AI x Bhashini's Suno Sutra: our first collaborative build and a direct answer to that challenge.
What does the Suno Sutra do?
Suno Sutra means “listening chronicles” in Hindi. Built with India's government-backed Bhashini, the Suno Sutra is a handheld device that can describe its surroundings via text or audio across the 22 languages of India.
Building on Bhashini’s expertise in bridging digital, literacy, and language divides, the Suno Sutra will empower citizens across India to engage with technology and participate in the digital economy without language barriers. This innovative, voice-first multilingual prototype enables seamless communication and access to digital services in multiple Indian languages.
This handheld device is entirely self-contained, runs AI models locally, and requires no internet connection. It features a camera, screen, microphone, and speaker, running three AI models simultaneously: a vision model, Bhashini's automatic speech recognition and machine translation model, and a text-to-speech model.
AI for your community, in your language
By taking on linguistic diversity directly, the Suno Sutra opens the door for community-led, public first AI for over 1.4 billion people living in India. The device is open source and allows anyone to invent, create and customize for their own needs. It offers a powerful foundation for builders looking to create their own AI devices.
"I appreciate the efforts toward developing inclusive, multilingual, and locally deployable AI solutions aligned with the vision of "AI for All"", said Shri Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology, India.
“AI that doesn’t understand dialect isn’t AI for all and this is why we endorse this initiative for diversity in language." – Emmanuel Macron, President of France
A platform to invent
At the AI Impact Summit in India two things were clear: people are hungry for tangible ways to interact with AI in an open and transparent way, and the open source movement is garnering support from the community at large. That’s why it was so special to unveil the Suno Sutra, our first public collaboration, at the Summit.
This AI Summit was a significant moment for us. A year on from the launch of Current AI at the AI Action Summit, we had a full-room brainstorm at the pre-launch of our first public good. Participants identified use cases that spanned how it could act as a cooking aid, be a safe storytelling companion for children, and help patients better communicate with doctors across language barriers.
The launch proved that the Suno Sutra is so much more than a device. It is a platform to invent.
What will you invent?
Current AI x Bhashini are launching an Innovation Challenge that invites communities to imagine what this device could become. Explore the boundaries of how open, embodied AI can enable many different futures, shaped by local needs, cultural contexts, and individual imagination, with complete privacy and control.
Take the design files, modify them, improve them, build your startup on them: from a Private Handheld voice recorder to a safe smart home toy, to an offline crop analyser or a tourism navigator.
Cheers,
Ayah