Voice, road safety, health: At AI Summit, innovations that impact & improve lives

Later, in a post on X on Tuesday, Modi described the summit as “a powerful convergence of ideas, innovation and intent,” which reaffirmed India’s push to build artificial intelligence “responsibly, inclusively and at scale”.

India AI Impact Expo 2026 was a powerful convergence of ideas, innovation and intent.

It showcased the extraordinary potential of Indian talent in shaping the future of Artificial Intelligence for global good.

Above all, it reaffirmed our commitment to harnessing AI… pic.twitter.com/jfVWCP4BHh

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) February 17, 2026

On Tuesday, The Indian Express visited some of the stalls that had held the PM’s attention – some focused on how machines speak and listen, others on how they see.

Gnani.ai: The importance of Voice

One was Gnani.ai, a Bengaluru-based deep-tech firm that has spent nearly a decade betting on voice as the most natural interface between humans and machines. The company’s co-founder and CEO Ganesh Gopalan had demonstrated their latest system to Modi on Monday, and had unveiled a five-billion-parameter voice-to-voice foundational model designed to enable natural spoken interaction across multiple Indian languages.

The system, called Inya VoiceOS, was inaugurated by the Prime Minister at the Summit, and released as a research preview ahead of a larger model planned by the company.

Modi, Gopalan said, had asked pointed questions about what set the model apart, where it could be used, and what its wider social impact might be.

“It was a great experience,” Gopalan said. “He (the PM) was very curious. I explained what was unique about this model, and why we think it can be a game changer.”

At the Expo, the company showcased its work in multilingual Voice AI. “When two humans talk, we don’t text each other,” Gopalan said. “Voice is the most natural form of communication.”

Founded in 2017, Gnani.ai began at a time when deep-tech AI startups did not have many takers in India. “Back then, AI wasn’t fashionable,” Gopalan said.

Finding funding was a struggle initially, Gopalan said. “We went through almost two years with no funding and no salaries. We met about a hundred investors, and most of them told us the same thing: ‘If you’re calling APIs of global companies, we’re interested. But if you’re trying to build deep tech on your own, Indians can’t do products.’ People said Indians are good for services, not products,” he said.

But despite persistent investor scepticism, Gopalan, a former corporate employee, and his co-founder went ahead with building their product company. “We stuck to our guns,” he said.

Finally, in 2019, Samsung invested in the company — the Korean giant’s first investment in an Indian startup. Subsequently, investment from the Internet company Info Edge followed.

Today, Gnani.ai works with more than 200 customers in India and abroad, including banks, consumer brands, and media organisations, and has clients in Japan, the Philippines, the Middle East and the United States.

Stellarview: Focused on safer roads

A few aisles away is the booth of Stellarview, a Pune-based startup building computer-vision systems for roads and public infrastructure.

Its plug-and-play cameras can detect number plates, speeding, and seatbelt and helmet violations, all without sending data to external servers. The system can track vehicles at speeds of up to 230 kmph, the company says.

Kunal Jagtap, chief business officer of Stellarview, said Prime Minister Modi was struck by the fact that the hardware-plus-software system had been built entirely in India.

“He was keen on an Indian company developing an end-to-end solution without dependence on foreign hardware,” Jagtap said.

The Prime Minister asked the team why the system was certified only up to the speed of 230 kmph. “We told him there were no vehicles to test beyond that speed,” Jagtap said.

Stellarview was founded four years ago. The bulk of the company’s clients are highway developers and operators — a group that includes Adani, IRB, and Ashoka Buildcon — and those working on projects under the National Highways Authority of India.

Initially, we were not a product company at all. We were in the services business, providing computer-vision software services, mainly to customers in the United States,” Aditya Joshi, DevOps and SecDevOps engineer at Stellarview, said.

“That services work helped us understand recurring problems and gaps across clients. Over time, we realised those learnings could be converted into a product,” he said.

“The services business and the product company were registered separately,” Joshi said. “We used the revenue generated from services to invest in building the product. That’s how the product company was bootstrapped in the early stages, without external funding.”

Eka.care: Doctors, patients, records

Another stall that caught the PM’s attention was eka.care, a digital health platform founded by Vikalp Sahni (40) and Deepak Tuli (45) in 2021.

The platform enables patients to manage and store their health records, and assists doctors in managing the histories of patients with AI tools such as Eka Doc and Eka Scribe.

Sahni, a graduate from IIT Silchar, is a passionate developer, and was one of the volunteer developers of the government-owned app Aarogya Setu that was launched during the Covid-19 pandemic.

He was quick to see the potential of using AI in healthcare after he realised how crucial it was to maintain proper health records.

“I saw that medical data are invaluable information that can save lives. And we don’t have that data in our phones… If I ask a simple question about the last five transactions on our phone, we would be able to easily show that, right? But if I ask, tell me your last two haemoglobin readings? That is very fundamental information,” Sahni said.

His brief interaction with Prime Minister Modi was substantive and meaningful, Sahni said. “I was not expecting such a deep conversation and deep questions; the amount of knowledge that he (Modi) had was just fantastic… Such as, ‘How accurate are your algorithms?’ ‘How will you scale this up to impact the general population?’ I thought those were very meaningful questions.”

There are currently 11,000 users on the platform, all based in India, Sahni said. Summits such as the AI Impact Summit provide exposure and help to connect with users, he said.