devnagri

On most mornings, someone in India is calling a helpline. It could be a farmer checking a subsidy status. A senior citizen asking about a pension. A commuter is trying to understand a new rule that arrived overnight. What often stands between them and clarity isn’t access to technology. It’s language. India may be digitally ambitious, but it is linguistically complex. English-first systems work for a small slice of users. Everyone else navigates menus, IVRs, and messages that feel distant, formal, or simply confusing. This is where AI, specifically multilingual conversational systems, has begun to quietly change how citizens and institutions talk to each other. Not with hype. With practicality. When Language Becomes the Bottleneck For years, digital citizen communication followed a predictable pattern. Web portals in English. Call centers with rigid IVR trees. Human agents struggling to handle volume, accents, and context at scale. The intent was always inclusion. The execution, less s...

If you listen closely to how India actually speaks, you’ll notice something important.  Nobody talks in clean, textbook language. A customer might say, “Order cancel kari do, refund kab milega?” Or, in Gujarat, “Payment thayi gayu che, pan confirmation nathi aavtu.” This isn’t broken language. This is the language. Yet for years, customer experience systems have operated as if people speak in neatly separated boxes: English, Hindi, or Gujarati. Real conversations don’t work that way. And customers feel the gap instantly. That gap is why code-mixed AI—systems that understand blended language like Hinglish or Gujlish—is no longer a “nice to have.” It’s becoming mission-critical for modern CX. The Shift From Translation to Understanding Early localization efforts focused on translation. Take an English sentence. Convert it into another language. Job done. But translation alone doesn’t capture how people think or speak. Code-mixing is not confusion; it’s efficiency. People borrow En...