HP to Pre-Install Sarvam AI's Kivi on Laptops in India

Sarvam AI and HP India have signed a memorandum of understanding to pre-install Kivi, an on-device voice assistant, on HP laptops across India. This partnership gives Sarvam immediate access to millions of users without acquisition costs, leveraging HP's dominant 26.5 percent share of the Indian laptop market. The integration represents a major step forward for India's domestic AI ecosystem, aligning with national efforts toward technological sovereignty.

Kivi functions as a voice layer over Windows, enabling users to perform voice dictation, content drafting, search, and cross-app assistance. It supports more than 22 Indian languages and handles code-switching, which allows users to naturally mix languages like Hindi and English mid-sentence. The application runs locally on the Sarvam Edge AI stack, which fits entirely under 1GB. It has been validated for Snapdragon's Hexagon NPU across phones and laptops, ensuring that voice, transcription, and translation run with zero latency and no per-query costs.

For developers and enterprise users, the deployment model prioritizes data privacy. Because Kivi runs on-device, sensitive audio data remains local. If a device's processing capacity is exceeded, inference overflows to Sarvam's India-hosted cloud infrastructure, ensuring that user data never leaves the country. This setup offers a secure, localized alternative to Western voice tools like Wispr Flow, particularly for industries with strict data residency requirements.

Founded in 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and CEO Pratyush Kumar, Sarvam AI recently raised 234 million dollars at a 1.5 billion dollar valuation. The funding round was led by HCLTech with a 150 million dollar investment, alongside participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, and Peak XV. According to HP India Managing Director Ipsita Dasgupta, the collaboration aims to make AI adoption more natural by integrating it directly into existing daily workflows.