We built a voice AI for Indian phone calls. The reality was way harder than we expected. 4-month update.

We accidentally replaced a small call center with an AI in under 4 months.
Didn’t plan to. Just happened because Indian businesses are drowning in phone calls.

We’re building Hunar, an AI voice agent made specifically for India. You set it up in minutes and it starts calling leads, candidates, customers, whoever your business already talks to daily.

What pushed us here was scale. One client needed to screen 2,000 candidates every single day. Another needed delivery confirmations across hundreds of cities. Hiring humans for this is slow, expensive, inconsistent, and burns people out.

We tried existing voice AI tools. They broke the moment someone said “haan bhaiya” or switched languages mid sentence like every Indian does. Most are built for quiet US offices, not noisy Indian reality.

So we rebuilt everything ourselves. Telephony, AI, analytics, all in house.

Fast forward 4 months:
Over 4 million leads processed
200,000 calls on our biggest day
~70% engagement on connected calls
Companies like Swiggy, Flipkart, Delhivery, Zepto, Tata, Apollo, HDFC Life already using it (still feels unreal)

The wild part? People in smaller cities are actually more comfortable talking to the AI than humans. Less hesitation, more honesty. Did not expect that.

The hard truth is Indian conversations are chaos. Long pauses, background noise, sudden call handovers, mixed languages, filler words. Handling this without the AI sounding dumb took months of painful iteration and we’re still improving daily.

Also something founders should know: most “cheap” voice AI tools are just stitched together vendors. At real scale they get crazy expensive and painful to debug. Our full stack approach ended up almost half the cost in real Indian usage.

We just opened proper self serve now. No sales calls, no enterprise contracts. Anyone can try it.

If your startup depends on calls (hiring, logistics, sales, healthcare, fintech, anything), what’s the most annoying part of your calling workflow right now?

Happy to answer anything about tech, costs, failures, or where voice AI actually works and where it doesn’t yet.