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Finnish phone-maker HMD bundles Indian AI chatbot onto new smartphone in push to reach local market

TechCrunch · May 22, 2026, 6:41 AM

Key takeaways

  • Finnish phone maker HMD today launched its first smartphone, called the Vibe 2 5G, which comes preloaded with Indian AI company Sarvam s chatbot Indus.
  • The Indus app is powered by Sarvam s locally trained 105-billion-parameter model — a measure of the AI s scale and sophistication — and launched at the AI summit.
  • The partnership is a potential testing ground for both companies to gauge the appetite for an India-focused chatbot.

Finnish phone maker HMD today launched its first smartphone, called the Vibe 2 5G, which comes preloaded with Indian AI company Sarvam s chatbot Indus. Both companies had first announced the partnership during the India AI summit held in New Delhi in February.

The Indus app is powered by Sarvam s locally trained 105-billion-parameter model — a measure of the AI s scale and sophistication — and launched at the AI summit. The app supports 22 Indic languages and mid-sentence code-switching (the ability to fluidly mix languages mid-conversation, like switching between Hindi and English), which helps the assistant better understand the context of a query. Currently, the application doesn t support offline usage, and it doesn t have any integrated feature with the device to invoke the AI assistant through a shortcut.

The partnership is a potential testing ground for both companies to gauge the appetite for an India-focused chatbot.

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