HMD pre-loads Sarvam’s Indus chatbot on Vibe 2 5G in India

HMD has turned its Vibe 2 5G into more than a low-cost handset. The phone, launched in India on May 21, was billed as the first smartphone to integrate Sarvam AI, with Sarvam’s Indus chatbot preloaded to bring device-level artificial intelligence to 22 Indic languages.

The move is a clear bet that AI on the phone should feel local, not imported. Sarvam describes Indus as a limited-beta interface to its 105-billion-parameter sovereign model, built for accuracy and alignment for India and shaped by user feedback. Sarvam says its broader platform supports speech-to-text, text-to-speech, translation and conversational agents across 22 Indian languages, a pitch aimed squarely at a market where English-only tools still miss much of the country.

For HMD, the partnership is also a business play. Ravi Kunwar, HMD’s vice president for India and APAC, said the company already has a leading value share in India’s feature-phone market and wants to convert that position into more smartphone share. The Vibe 2 5G was set up as the entry point for that strategy: media reports said the phone starts at Rs 10,999, and HMD said it would be sold exclusively through Flipkart.

The launch also lands in the middle of a broader national push around AI sovereignty. India AI Impact Summit 2026 was scheduled for February 19 to 20 in New Delhi and was described by the government as the first-ever global AI summit hosted in the Global South. Sarvam followed that moment in March 2026 by open-sourcing its 30B and 105B models and saying the 105B model is available on Indus, underscoring its effort to build a domestic AI stack rather than depend on foreign platforms.

Taken together, HMD’s handset launch and Sarvam’s software strategy show how device makers are starting to treat sovereign AI as a market differentiator. In India, where language, trust and local relevance can determine whether a product gets used at all, HMD is betting that an Indian-built chatbot inside a budget phone can do what generic global assistants have not: sound like it was made for the country it serves.