15 August 2026 · Independence Day · Online
Building with Sarvam for India's AI Sovereignty
A 3-hour hands-on session on India's own AI stack
Saturday 15 August · 4:00–7:00 PM IST · ₹9
Recording goes to everyone who registers
The pitch
On 15 August, India turns 79.
At Sarvam Epoch 2026, their first developer conference, held in Bengaluru on 30–31 July 2026, Sarvam announced a wave of new work across the stack — a 105B open-weights reasoning model, a new generation of speech models spanning all 22 scheduled Indian languages, an agentic platform, a desktop voice assistant, and an on-prem stack for defence. Much of it has yet to reach their documentation.
Meanwhile, roughly 800 million Indians don't transact comfortably in English, and a long list of regulated Indian buyers — banks, hospitals, government — structurally cannot send data offshore.
That isn't a patriotic argument. It's a market, and it's badly underbuilt.
This session is three hours of showing you exactly what exists, how to call it, and what it costs.
What you'll actually do
Not a lecture. You'll have your editor open the whole time.
Run one script that touches the entire stack
Speech-to-text, text-to-speech, translation, transliteration, language detection, document extraction, and the 105B model — one file, executed on your own API key, printing exactly what each call cost you in ₹.
Hear your own language spoken by code you just ran
Generate speech in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, Punjabi or Telugu. Play it back. It's a small moment and it changes how the whole thing feels.
Transcribe code-mixed Indian audio five different ways
“Mera EMI due date kya hai” — transcribe, translate, verbatim, transliterate, code-mix. See why Western models fall over on real Indian speech and telephony audio.
Use Indus, the six-tool agentic platform
Work agents, voice agents, content agents, doc agents, coding agents. Hands-on, on a real task, with me narrating what's happening underneath.
Watch Kivi drive a computer by voice, in Hindi
Sarvam's desktop voice tool, live. Plus Sarvam Code, and how to make your AI coding assistant actually good at this stack.
Derive the unit economics of a voice product, live
What a 3-minute AI call in Hindi actually costs. Why 60% of it isn't the AI. When you should build it yourself and when you should just buy Samvaad at ₹3.5/minute. This is the part people tell their colleagues about on Monday.
Who this is for
You'll get a lot out of this if you:
- Write Python and have called a REST API before
- Are curious about Indian-language AI but have never got past creating an API key
- Are a founder or PM trying to work out whether there's a business here
- Are a student who wants to build something that actually works in your own language
You do not need: any prior AI, ML, or voice experience. No LLM background. No maths.
This is probably not for you if you want deep theory, model training, or fine-tuning. This is about building products on top of models that already exist.
Why ₹9?
Not for the money.
Free online sessions run at about 40% attendance. I'd rather teach a full room than an empty one, and a ₹9 commitment turns out to make a real difference to whether people show up.
Everyone who registers gets the recording, whether you make it on the day or not.
FAQ
- Will there be a recording?
- Yes. Everyone who registers gets it, regardless of attendance.
- What if I can't code in Python?
- You'll still follow the concepts, the economics, and the platform demos — but you'll get much more out of it if you can run a script.
- Do I need to pay Sarvam anything?
- No. New accounts get ₹100 in free credit, and everything in this session costs about ₹5 of it.
- Is this affiliated with Sarvam?
- No. It's community-run. I've contributed to their open-source cookbook and write about the stack, but this session is independent.
- Can my team attend together?
- Yes — everyone needs their own registration and their own API key.
- Refunds?
- It's ₹9 and the recording is included, so there are no refunds. If something goes badly wrong on my end, just write to me.