Vijaye Raji, Chief Technology Officer, Applications at OpenAI

OpenAI has seen ChatGPT usage in India double over the past year as it steps up efforts to expand access to AI through localised voice capabilities, affordable subscriptions, and tools for developers and enterprises.

India is among OpenAI’s largest developer markets, with adoption spanning education, coding, communication and enterprise applications.

Affordable subscriptions to expand access

In August last year, the AI giant announced ChatGPT Go, a low-cost subscription plan that provides expanded access to ChatGPT’s most popular features for ₹399/month. Initially available only in India, the plan was subsequently rolled out to other countries before becoming available globally in January 2026.

Addressing the media ahead of DevDay India in Bengaluru, Vijaye Raji, Chief Technology Officer, Applications at OpenAI, said the company is working to make its products more accessible to India’s multilingual, mobile-first user base, including through improved voice interactions.

“ChatGPT Go is primarily targeted at India because we want to reduce the cost and make sure that people can access frontier models. We want to make sure that people can access intelligence. It’s not just enough that we build all these capable products, but we want to make it usable,” Raji said.

New voice technology targets multilingual users

OpenAI is rolling out GPT-Live-1.1, an upgrade to its voice technology, with improved pronunciation, better handling of multilingual and mixed-language speech, and more natural conversational transitions. The update also introduces 13 new voices across seven languages, including two Hindi voices, Neer and Leher, designed to make voice conversations sound more natural.

The updated voice capabilities will initially roll out in the ChatGPT application, allowing users to hold conversations in Hindi rather than relying only on text-based prompts or dictation. OpenAI is also working to support conversations in India’s top languages.

“India is an audio-first market. That is a learning that we’re taking back to the product team,” Raji said.

India investment and pricing strategy

Pricing is another part of the strategy. OpenAI introduced its ChatGPT Go subscription tier in India to lower the cost of accessing its models and features, before expanding the offering to other markets.

Raji said making AI affordable and accessible was central to the company’s mission, including ensuring that users could access free services.

“We launched ads in India, and so will invest in the country again. This is a great way for our advertisers in the Indian market to reach people with the relevant context. Looking ahead, we see a lot of growth and adoption from India, which means we will invest quite a bit,” he said.

Coding tools see 17-fold growth in usage

Beyond consumer use, OpenAI is seeing increased adoption of its coding tools among developers and companies, from startups to large enterprises. Token usage for coding has grown about 17-fold since February, Raji said, adding that teams are increasingly using the tools beyond software development, including in finance and legal.

“India is one of the largest developer markets. We’ve seen large growth in developers’ usage of Codex, which started out as a developer tool, but is doing a lot more now. We’re seeing huge adoption of coding tools among startups and large companies,” he noted

Voice is emerging as one such enterprise use case, particularly in customer support and voice agents.

OpenAI expands enterprise support in India

OpenAI has offices in Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Delhi, and Raji said the company would keep investing in India as its needs grow.

Raji said OpenAI aims to make its products largely self-serve, while deploying forward-deployed engineering (FDE) teams to help large enterprises integrate its models with existing systems. The company has FDE teams in India that work directly with local enterprises on implementation and integration.

Company highlights AI safety measures

Amid recent breaches, Raji said OpenAI continues to invest in model alignment and safety measures, focusing on deploying new products responsibly.

“We have invested in alignment and safety during the training process, so much so that Astra is the most aligned model. As the models get more capable, they will also be cyber capable, which means we need to invest more. We are taking many precautions and paying attention to safety concerns before launching new models,” he said.

Published on October 16, 2026