The Karnataka government signed a memorandum on Tuesday with the global voice artificial intelligence company ElevenLabs Inc. The partnership aims to study the application of voice AI to ensure responsible innovation, improve public services, and achieve social impact, officials reported.
The signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was carried out through the Karnataka Innovation and Technology Society (KITS) under the Department of Electronics, Information Technology, and Biotechnology.
The collaboration will focus on three key areas. Firstly, developing a voice AI security system. Secondly, planning the use of AI-based voice restoration to support people who have lost the ability to speak. Thirdly, partners will explore ways to use voice AI to enhance the accessibility of public services for citizens, as stated in the official announcement.
Karnataka's Minister of Information Technology, Priyank Kharge, emphasized that the ultimate evaluation of AI must be based on the benefit it brings to people, noting that voice AI opens up opportunities for creating a more accessible and citizen-centric governance system.
He stated that through this partnership with ElevenLabs, Karnataka has a chance to work on both aspects: developing more robust protection measures for the responsible use of voice AI and researching applications that can solve real citizen problems.
As voice AI becomes increasingly capable of generating realistic synthetic speech, Karnataka and ElevenLabs will jointly work on creating a platform-independent voice AI security system for the state. ElevenLabs will provide its expertise to be incorporated into Karnataka's Responsible AI Framework, paying special attention to risks associated with audio and voice AI.
The agreement includes studying protective mechanisms related to deepfake detection, audio recording provenance, and watermarking, as well as issues of consent for voice cloning, restrictions on cloning public figures, and protection against fraud and voice impersonation.
Furthermore, the partnership will examine measures to protect government representatives and institutions interacting with the public from unauthorized voice cloning. The collaboration also includes capacity building and knowledge-sharing programs for civil servants and relevant departments.
According to the MoU, ElevenLabs will provide free lifetime licenses under its One Million Voices program to citizens designated by the state government or organizations operating under its guidance.