OpenAI sharpens focus on voice, multilingual support to tailor ChatGPT for India: Applications CTO Vijaye Raji- Moneycontrol.com

October 16, 2026 / 07:57 IST

OpenAI is stepping up its focus on voice, multilingual support and image generation in India to adapt ChatGPT to local usage patterns in one of its largest markets, a top executive told Moneycontrol.

"India is such a strategic and important market that we want to make sure that people are able to get access to intelligence. It’s not just enough that we build all these capable products, but we want to make it usable," Vijaye Raji, CTO of Applications, OpenAI told Moneycontrol ahead of the firm's DevDay India event in Bengaluru.

Originally from Pondicherry, Raji is part of a growing cohort of Indian-origin tech leaders at the IPO-bound company. He joined OpenAI in September 2025 following the acquisition of his startup Statsig. Other prominent executives include Uday Ruddarraju, who heads OpenAI's infrastructure and compute operations and Arvind KC, its chief people officer.

Voice a key area of focus

Raji said voice is a key area of focus, given that India is an audio-first market. OpenAI is working to make ChatGPT better at handling voice interactions, including conversations in which users switch between English and Hindi in the same session.

"We want the model to be able to understand that and respond to it. People use voice notes, so there is a lot we are learning. We want to make sure we are building these features," he said.

On October 15, OpenAI rolled out GPT-Live-1.1, a new version of its voice model that improves pronunciation and adds 13 new voices, including two new Hindi voices (Neer and Leher). Other languages include French, German, Mexican Spanish, Korean, and Japanese.

First introduced in July, GPT-Live is a new family of voice models designed to enable more natural human-AI interactions and currently powers ChatGPT Voice. GPT-Live-1.1 is currently being rolled to all users on ChatGPT and will be available to developers through API soon.

“This is a Hindi-tuned model. You can have a conversation today in any Indian language, but this feels more natural, more like we're having a conversation,” Raji said.

India is also a "pretty large user" of OpenAI's image-generation tool, ImageGen, he noted.

“We've made so much improvement in ImageGen. It's faster, more efficient, actually able to deliver more expressive images recently,” Raji said. "We're investing quite a bit in multimodal experiences"

Another recent feature is generating interactive user interfaces in ChatGPT in response to queries rather than returning answers solely in text. The feature also adapts to the language in which a user asks a question, Raji said.

“One thing I wanted to explore is what a differentiated product experience for India would look like. How do we make our products reliable even when connectivity is intermittent?” he said.

Raji added that OpenAI wants to build native Android experiences into its products, given that India is an Android-first market, unlike the US, where iOS is more prominent.

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