ChatGPT use in India doubles as OpenAI adds Hindi voices

01.What OpenAI announced

OpenAI says ChatGPT usage in India has doubled over the past year, as the company steps up efforts to reach the country's large, mobile-first user base. The figure was shared ahead of DevDay India, OpenAI's developer event in Bengaluru, where Vijaye Raji, the company's Chief Technology Officer for Applications, briefed the media. Raji said India is among OpenAI's largest developer markets, with adoption spread across education, coding, communication and enterprise applications.

The headline product announcement was GPT-Live-1.1, an upgrade to OpenAI's voice technology. According to the company, it brings better pronunciation, improved handling of multilingual and mixed-language speech, and more natural conversational transitions. The update adds 13 new voices across seven languages. The voices are part of a wider effort to make the assistant feel less like a machine and more like a natural speaking partner.

02.Two new Hindi voices

Two of the new voices are Hindi ones, named Neer and Leher. They are meant to make spoken conversations sound more natural. The updated voice features will roll out first inside the ChatGPT app, allowing users to hold conversations in Hindi rather than relying only on text prompts or dictation. OpenAI said it is working to support conversations in India's top languages as well.

Raji described India as an audio-first market, a lesson he said the company is taking back to its product team. That matters in a country where many people are far more comfortable speaking than typing, and where everyday speech often mixes languages. Better handling of mixed-language speech could make the assistant useful to users who move between Hindi, English and a regional language in the same sentence.

03.A plan priced for India

OpenAI has also used pricing to widen access. It launched ChatGPT Go, a lower-cost subscription offering expanded access to ChatGPT's most popular features, at ₹399 a month. The plan was introduced in India in August last year, then extended to other countries, and became available globally in January 2026. The tier was designed to sit between the free version and OpenAI's pricier paid plans, making advanced features affordable for a wider set of users.

Raji said ChatGPT Go was targeted at India first because the goal was to cut the cost of reaching frontier models and make them usable, not just capable. He said the company wants people to be able to access intelligence. OpenAI also said it has launched ads in India, describing it as a way for Indian advertisers to reach people with relevant context, and said it expects to invest further in the country as adoption grows.

04.Developers, businesses and jobs

Beyond consumer use, OpenAI said adoption of its coding tools has grown sharply. Token usage for coding has risen about 17-fold since February, Raji said, with teams using the tools beyond software development, including in finance and legal work. He called India one of the largest developer markets and pointed to strong growth in the use of Codex, which began as a developer tool but now does much more.

OpenAI has offices in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi. It aims to keep its products largely self-serve while deploying forward-deployed engineering teams to help large enterprises connect its models to their existing systems. Voice is emerging as an enterprise use case too, especially in customer support and voice agents. Raji also said OpenAI continues to invest in model alignment and safety, noting that more capable models will also be more cyber capable, and that the company takes precautions before launching new models.

05.What it means for Indian readers

For students and professionals, better Hindi and mixed-language voice support makes these tools easier to use without fluent English typing. Affordable plans and free tiers lower the cost of trying them out. Voice-first tools can also help people who find English text interfaces hard, and small shops can use simple voice agents to handle routine customer questions. For developers and small businesses, the fast growth of coding tools and voice agents shows where everyday work is heading, and which skills are likely to be in demand.

The bigger signal is that global AI companies are treating India as a lead market rather than an afterthought, testing products, languages and pricing here first. That gives Indian users more choice and more competition, which usually pushes prices down. It is also a reminder to stay alert to questions of data, privacy and how these tools reshape the way people study, work and run small businesses.