SyncWords Expands Indian Language Support with Sarvam AI

India is a market that is difficult to ignore.

With a population of roughly 1.46 billion people and an Indian diaspora of around 35 million people living around the world, there is an enormous audience for Indian news, sports, entertainment, and other live content. But reaching that audience isn't simply a matter of translating content into one or two languages. India is home to hundreds of languages and regional language communities, each with its own audience.

That is why we are pleased to announce that SyncWords has added Sarvam AI to our language technology stack, expanding the range of Indian languages available through our live transcription and dubbing workflows. The addition brings support for Odia, Nepali, Maithili, Manipuri, Konkani, Kashmiri, Dogri, Bodo, and Assamese, alongside the Indian languages already supported by SyncWords.

A huge audience for live content

India has become one of the world's largest markets for digital video. The country's OTT audience reached an estimated 665 million people in 2026, according to the Ormax OTT Audience Report. A significant part of that growth is happening outside the traditional Hindi and English markets. Research from IAMAI and Kantar has found that regional-language content plays a major role in how Indians use the internet, with 98% of surveyed users accessing content in Indic languages and more than half of urban users preferring regional-language content. Live sports are an obvious example.

Cricket is deeply embedded in Indian culture, and the size of the audience is enormous. Reuters recently cited an estimate of 492 million cricket fans in India, while the International Olympic Committee has described cricket as having access to more than 2 billion fans globally. That creates a huge opportunity for broadcasters and streaming platforms looking to make live sports more accessible to different audiences. And it isn't only about cricket.

India has a large and growing appetite for live news and current affairs as well. According to the Reuters Institute's 2026 Digital News Report, more than half of surveyed Indian respondents said they use social media for news, while television remains an important source of news. The report also highlights the continued growth of regional-language news and hyperlocal content. For all of these types of content, language can make a significant difference in how easily an audience can follow and engage with a live program.

Adding more Indian languages to live workflows

This is where our work with Sarvam AI comes in. Sarvam has developed speech technology specifically for the Indian language environment. By integrating Sarvam's speech recognition and voice technology with SyncWords, we can give customers additional options for handling Indian languages within the same workflows they use for live captioning, subtitles, translation, and dubbing. For a broadcaster, that could mean adding regional-language captions to a live news channel. For a sports platform, it could mean providing translated captions or audio for a live cricket match. For an event organizer, it could mean allowing attendees to follow a presentation in a language they are more comfortable with.

And for a streaming service, it can provide another way to make existing content available to regional audiences in India and to Indian audiences around the world. The important part is that these are live workflows. A cricket match is happening now. A news story is developing now. A conference speaker is presenting now. The localization needs to happen alongside the content, rather than days or weeks later.

Reaching audiences in India and around the world

The opportunity also extends well beyond India's borders. There are approximately 35 million people in the Indian diaspora around the world, according to Indian government data. Those audiences continue to have strong connections to Indian sports, news, entertainment, and cultural content. For broadcasters and streaming services, that creates an opportunity to serve audiences both within India and in international markets where Indian communities are significant. And those audiences don't all speak the same language.

Someone watching a cricket match in the United States, the UK, the Middle East, Australia, or Canada may prefer to follow it in an Indian regional language rather than English or Hindi. The same can be true for news, entertainment, religious programming, and live events. Being able to support more languages therefore isn't just about serving people in different parts of India. It can also help content owners extend the reach of Indian programming to audiences around the world.

Why we added Sarvam

SyncWords already supports live captioning, subtitling, translation, and dubbing in more than 100 languages. Adding Sarvam gives us another set of tools for expanding our coverage of Indian languages, particularly languages that have not traditionally been well supported by mainstream speech technology.

That's important because customers don't necessarily want to build a separate workflow for every language they need to support. They want to be able to take their live content, choose the languages they need, and deliver the resulting captions, subtitles, or audio through the platforms they already use. Our work with Sarvam helps make that possible for more Indian languages.

More languages means more people can watch

The goal here isn't simply to add nine more languages to a list. It's to give broadcasters, sports networks, news organizations, event producers, and streaming platforms more ways to reach the audiences they already have, and audiences they may not have been able to serve effectively before.

India's size makes it an important market. Its linguistic diversity makes it a particularly interesting localization challenge. And the growth of digital video, live sports, and regional-language news makes the opportunity increasingly difficult to overlook. We are excited to take another step toward addressing that opportunity with Sarvam AI.

And we will continue looking for ways to expand our language coverage so that more people can follow live content in a language that works for them, whether they are watching from Mumbai, Delhi, New York, London, Dubai, Sydney, or anywhere else in the world.

Learn more about SyncWords and our live captioning, translation, and dubbing solutions at syncwords.com.