Josh Talks Develops First Full-Duplex Hindi Conversational AI Model
The new model, called Human-1, can process speech while generating responses simultaneously.
Josh Talks has developed what it describes as the world’s first full-duplex conversational AI model in Hindi, a system that can listen and speak at the same time, enabling more natural voice interactions compared with traditional voice assistants.
Most voice assistants today operate in a turn-based format where users must finish speaking before the system responds. The new model, called Human-1, can process speech while generating responses simultaneously. This allows the system to acknowledge users mid-sentence, respond in real time and handle interruptions without disrupting the flow of conversation.
“Voice AI has learned to recognise speech and generate speech. What it has not yet learned well is how to participate in conversation,” said Shobhit Banga, co-founder of Josh Talks. “This research shows that when models are trained on large-scale natural dialogue, they can begin to learn the rhythm of how people actually speak to each other. By building this infrastructure using Hindi conversations, we have demonstrated that full-duplex conversational systems can be developed beyond English.”
To build the model, the company trained it on 26,000 hours of natural Hindi conversations involving nearly 15,000 speakers. Unlike traditional datasets that rely on scripted speech, the training data captures real interactions, including interruptions, pauses and conversational cues such as acknowledgements during dialogue.
According to Banga, the dataset represents the first step in a larger effort to build a one-million-hour corpus of conversational speech to advance voice AI research.
Josh Talks has open-sourced the Hindi duplex conversational model to encourage research into conversational AI for Indian languages. While the underlying dataset remains proprietary, the release allows developers and researchers to experiment with full-duplex architectures and build systems that better reflect how people naturally communicate.
Josh Talks AI is a sister company of Josh Talks Media, one of India’s largest vernacular storytelling platforms. Josh Talks AI focuses on building large-scale conversational speech datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation infrastructure to support the development of voice AI for Indian languages.
