About
I’m the Co-Founder of Josh Talks, where our current focus (ai.joshtalks.com) is on…
Articles by Supriya
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Future of Skills: Five Things We Must Focus On
Future of Skills: Five Things We Must Focus On
Did you know that India’s average workforce is just 28 years old? In contrast to comparable economies like China and…
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International Women's Day, Everyday!
International Women's Day, Everyday!
In the last month, I have probably received more than 50+ emails, calls and messages (combined) inviting me to speak at…
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Supriya Paul shared thisMost AI systems have never heard what a healthcare conversation in rural India actually sounds like. Those conversations aren't neat. People slip between languages mid-sentence. They happen in noisy clinics, homes, and health camps. They carry urgency, doubt, and context that never fits into a form. If AI is going to support public health and care delivery at scale, it has to handle that reality. Because that's the job. That's the problem the DISPLACE-M challenge is built to solve. Led by Prof. Sriram Ganapathy and the team at Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore - with partners across NIT Karnataka, IIT Bombay, UPES, and others, and support from BHASHINI, MeitY, and the Ministry of Education - DISPLACE-M exists to advance speech and language AI specifically for frontline healthcare settings in India. Josh Talks prepared all the speech data that powers it. Real conversations between ASHAs (Accredited Social Health Activists) and patients. Not studio audio. Not scripted dialogues. Multilingual, code-mixed interactions - the kind that actually happen in primary healthcare settings across India. In healthcare, getting the conversation right shapes what's understood, what's written down, and what happens next. Phase I just wrapped. Around 10–15 teams - from startups, academia, and industry, both in India and globally - competed across four tasks: speaker diarization, automatic speech recognition, topic identification, and clinical note summarization. Phase II is now open, and runs from March 20 to May 20. If you're building in speech AI, healthcare AI, or Indic language models - this is where the hard, meaningful work is. Link in comments
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Supriya Paul shared thisA lot of women are taught to admire tech from a distance, not enter it. Not explicitly. But subtly, repeatedly, over time. You grow up seeing tech treated like a male domain. A world of coders, engineers, jargon, and certainty. And if you are a woman from a non-technical background, it can feel even further away. You start to believe tech is for people who have been building since they were 15, for people with the right degrees. For people who sound technical the moment they open their mouth. And many women do what we have been conditioned to do in rooms like that: we underestimate ourselves before we even begin. I know that feeling. I came from media. From storytelling, content, audiences, emotion, communication. Not from engineering labs. Not from computer science. Not from deep technical training. And today, I work on speech infrastructure. If you had told me earlier that my work would one day involve thinking deeply about evaluation systems, model behaviour, infrastructure, and how AI systems perform in the real world, I would probably have laughed. Not because I could not do it. But because I had quietly absorbed the idea that this world was not really meant for me. I think that is true for many women. Our fear of tech is often not about ability. It is about conditioning. It is about being made to feel that technical confidence belongs to someone else. Some of the smartest women stay away from tech not because they lack the capacity, but because they think they need permission they were never given. This is why I think this moment is so important. AI is changing the entry point. It is reducing the distance between “I don’t understand this” and “let me explore this.” It does not replace deep expertise but it does make the road into tech less intimidating. And that is huge for women. My own move from media into speech infra has shown me this very clearly: you do not need to begin as a technical person to become one. You need curiosity. You need courage. You need the willingness to stay in the discomfort of not knowing. So to every woman who has felt that tech is intimidating, alien, or somehow not for her: Please do not mistake that fear for truth. A lot of that fear was taught. A lot of it came from culture, not capability. And a lot of it can now be unlearned. Give tech a chance. Not because you need to become someone else. But because this is one of the first moments where the walls around it are actually starting to come down. You do not have to fear technology to build with it and you definitely do not need a traditional technical background to belong in the room. Sometimes, all that changes a life is realizing the room was yours to enter all along.
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Supriya Paul shared thisLast week the Josh Talks AI team went to Thailand for an offsite. The truth is, we needed it. The last year has been intense. We’ve been grinding non-stop : building datasets, shipping projects, chasing timelines, figuring things out in a space that keeps moving under your feet. When you’re working in AI, it’s very easy to slip into a rhythm where every week feels urgent and every problem feels like it has to be solved yesterday. After a year like that, we all felt it. We were proud but tired. And when that happens, you have two options - keep pushing and risk burning out, or step back for a moment and reset together. So we planned the offsite. But here’s the honest part. The team still worked. Not because anyone was forced to. But because the reality of this field is that things can change overnight. A new model drops. A new paper shifts what people care about. A capability that didn’t exist last week suddenly becomes table stakes. In AI, the teams that win are rarely the ones with the most resources. They’re the ones that move first. The ones that try things earlier, learn faster, and ship before everyone else catches up. So instead of pretending we could completely switch off, we set some simple guardrails. Only the most important work. Half the day planned together - meals, activities, time to just be a team again. The rest of the day open. People could rest, explore, sit by the pool, or work if they needed to. The rule was simple: do what truly matters, move things forward as much as possible, and let the rest wait. And interestingly, people still chose to move things forward. A few important conversations happened. Some ideas got clearer. Some decisions moved faster than they would have in the office. But the bigger thing that happened was that the team laughed again. People had space to breathe. We remembered that we’re building something difficult together, and that it’s okay to pause for a moment while doing it. Because the goal isn’t burnout. It’s finding a pace you can sustain for years. Even if sometimes that means replying on Slack right after a team massage. 😄
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Supriya Paul shared thisFor the last decade, one question has quietly shaped everything we built at Josh Talks. What does it mean to truly give people a voice? When we started Josh Talks, that meant giving people a stage to tell their stories. Stories in Hindi. Stories in Punjabi. Stories in languages that rarely found space on the internet. Because something interesting happens when people are able to speak in their own language. They don’t just communicate information. They communicate emotion - hesitation, warmth, humour, doubt, curiosity. All the tiny signals that make us human. And if you observe real conversations closely, you notice something important. Humans don’t speak in neat turns. We interrupt each other. We say “haan…” while someone is still talking. We pause. We laugh. We overlap. Conversation is not a sequence. It is a rhythm. For a long time, voice technology has struggled with this. Most voice assistants work like a walkie-talkie. You speak. They wait. Then they respond. But that’s not how humans talk. So over the last few months, the Josh Talks AI team started asking a deeper question: What if AI could actually participate in conversation the way humans do? Not just recognize or generate speech. But listen and speak at the same time. Today, we are excited to share something that moves us a step closer to that vision. We have built the first open source full-duplex conversational AI model in Hindi - a system that can listen while speaking, acknowledge you mid-sentence, and handle interruptions the way real conversations unfold. Why does this matter? Because voice will likely become the most natural way millions of people interact with technology. Especially in countries like India, where typing is not always the default way people communicate with the internet. And if that future is going to work, machines cannot force humans to speak like machines. Machines must learn to speak like humans. That means learning the rhythm of conversation. The signals of listening. The small sounds that say “I’m with you.” This work is only an early step. But it shows something important: When AI is trained on real human conversations, it begins to understand not just words but the music of dialogue. And that might be the key to making technology feel truly natural. We’ve open-sourced the model so researchers and builders can explore this new direction for conversational AI in Indian languages. Because the future of voice technology should not belong to just a few languages. It should belong to everyone who speaks. If you’re curious, the video below shows a live conversation between a human and the model. And honestly, the moment you hear it… you realize how powerful natural conversation with machines could become.
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Supriya Paul shared thisThanks for the mention Google Developers Group. It's an amazing time to be building and it's great to see so many women transition into new roles with industries shifting.Supriya Paul shared thisAs promised, we’re kicking off our week-long celebration of the incredible women shaping our ecosystem. 🚀 From academia to AI infrastructure, these leaders are redefining what’s possible in tech: Shruti Mishra: Bridging the gap between the classroom and the industry, turning theoretical learning into real-world impact at P P Savani University. 🎓 Aprajita Verma: A veteran with 15+ years of engineering depth, now architecting the future of inclusive UX and mentoring the next generation of developers. ✨ Aparna Prabhu: From navigating career breaks to driving Managed NFS and AI roadmaps at DigitalOcean, she is a masterclass in resilience and engineering leadership. ☁️ Supriya Paul: Revolutionizing speech infrastructure at Josh Talks. Through Voice of India (VOI), she’s ensuring AI finally understands the diverse dialects of our country. 🎙️ Shruti Tiwari: A champion for both product marketing and professional confidence, hosting AI/ML events that empower over 150+ pros to say #IAmRemarkable. 🌟 These are the builders making equality a reality. Stay tuned as we dive deeper into more such journeys all week! 🥂💐 #InternationalWomensDay #GDGIndia #WomenInTech #IWD2026 #GoogleDevs
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Supriya Paul shared thisOnly about 50% of Grade 5 children in India can read a Grade 2 level text. This is why foundational literacy and numeracy remain one of the most important challenges in education today. Encouragingly, we’re beginning to see serious research and institutional attention directed toward solving it. One such effort is Bodhan AI, an initiative exploring how technology can support early learning for children. The work brings together researchers like Professor Mitesh Khapra from institutions like IIT Madras, alongside support from the Ministry of Education and other ecosystem partners focused on improving learning outcomes through technology. What makes this problem particularly interesting is that children don’t primarily learn through keyboards or screens. They learn through listening, speaking, and interacting with language. So if AI systems are going to support early learning meaningfully, they need to understand how children actually speak across accents, languages, and real classroom environments. That’s where data and research infrastructure become critical. Over the past few years, at Josh Talks, we’ve been working on building large‑scale speech datasets across Indian languages and contexts including child speech. Work like this increasingly finds relevance in areas such as education research, where understanding real speech patterns can help improve how learning technologies interact with children. Solving foundational learning challenges at scale will require collaboration - between researchers, institutions, government initiatives, and ecosystem builders. And if done right, the impact could extend far beyond classrooms.
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Supriya Paul shared thisThe fastest way to kill a startup? Fall in love with your first plan. Josh Talks started with a simple belief: powerful stories can change lives. That hasn’t changed. It never will. Talks are, and will always remain, an integral part of our identity. But as we built across Indian languages and voices, something became clear. We weren’t just amplifying stories. We were building one of the most diverse, multilingual voice ecosystems in the country. Thousands of speakers. Hundreds of accents. Dozens of languages. Real, human speech at scale. When AI and voice technologies began accelerating, we saw something others didn’t. The world needed high‑quality, culturally rich, multilingual audio datasets. And we were uniquely positioned to build them. We didn’t stop being Josh Talks. We evolved Josh Talks. From storytelling on stage to powering the speech systems of tomorrow. That shift required agility. It meant seeing our strengths differently. It meant expanding our identity, not replacing it. As a founder, I’ve learned this: Vision keeps you grounded. Agility helps you grow. And sometimes the biggest opportunity isn’t outside your company. It’s hidden inside what you’ve already built as long as you remain open to it.
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Supriya Paul shared thisA week later, the real impact of the India AI Summit isn’t in the headlines. It’s in the conversations that followed. Founders are taking AI more seriously - not as a side project, but as a core direction. In colleges, students aren’t just experimenting with tools. They’re talking about building AI startups, working on Indian language models, and using domestic compute. For schools and universities, being part of the summit mattered. Exposure changes confidence. When young builders see AI discussed at a national level, it makes the opportunity feel real - and closer to home. For startups, the message was simple: AI in India isn’t a trend. It’s a priority. Was it perfect? No event is. But it created belief. And belief is what fuels the next wave. That shift is already visible and an event like this needs to be celebrated despite every hiccup.
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Supriya Paul shared thisEveryone is still talking about the chaos of the India AI Summit. I’m thinking about what actually happened. In five days, India moved the AI conversation from aspiration to infrastructure. Not panels. Not theory. Execution. Deployment at scale. 170+ real AI case studies across health, agriculture, energy, education and inclusion. This wasn’t “AI will change India.” It was: it already is. We launched Voice of India, an Indic speech benchmark built to test AI on how India actually speaks. Multilingual. Messy. Real. Sovereign compute. 20,000+ GPUs added. National cluster now 58,000+. That’s not optics. That’s capacity. Indigenous capability. 105B parameter Indian LLMs. 22 languages. Multimodal. Offline capability. Built here. Capital. $250B+ in infrastructure pledges. $1.1B AI VC fund. Global partnerships across OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind and Indian conglomerates. Governance. 88 countries signing the New Delhi Declaration on inclusive AI. Was it perfect? No. But something important shifted. For the first time, India’s AI narrative felt coordinated across policy, compute, capital, and capability. The real question isn’t whether the summit was chaotic. It’s whether we can now execute at the same speed we announced. Because if we do, this week won’t be remembered for long queues. It’ll be remembered as the moment India decided to build, not just participate.
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Anubhav Garg here you go - https://displace2026.github.io/#registration
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Supriya Paul reacted on thisSupriya Paul reacted on this📌 The AI Samarth Content Library is now live as a Digital Public Good, a step towards Empowering Bharat with AI Literacy! Built on the previously launched #AILiteracy Curriculum Framework, this content library is structured around four core pillars for students and parents, with an additional pillar for teachers. These pillars support a clear progression from foundational understanding of AI to real-world application, with each sub-topic providing practical, classroom-ready resources for learners. As the ecosystem gears up for #AILiteracyDay later this week on 27 March, dive deep into the new AI Samarth website and discover: ✅ High-quality AI Literacy content accessible to diverse learners across India ✅ Ready-to-use videos and teaching-learning materials (TLMs) ✅ Easy filtering by user type, language, and pillar ✅ Videos and TLMs available in English, Hindi, Odia, Marathi, Bengali, and Telugu ➡️ Explore here: https://lnkd.in/g_nNpRzU Here’s to empowering every learner to contribute to the vision of a #ViksitBharat with AI Literacy!💡 AI Samarth is a national AI literacy initiative by CSF with support from Google.org and technical collaboration with Wadhwani School of Data Science and AI, IIT Madras. Tag someone who will find this content repository useful! . . #IndiaAIMission #AISamarth #AILiteracy #SabkaEdTech #EducationForFuture #Tech4Learning #DigitalInnovation #AIPublicGood #DPG #DigitalPublicGoods #AILiteracyAsFoundationalSkill
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Supriya Paul liked thisSupriya Paul liked thisIn partnership with the District Administration, Nandurbar, the Government of Maharashtra (GoM), and BHASHINI - (Digital India BHASHINI Division), we are marking an important milestone in our work on documenting and building for low resource tribal languages. The Bhili Foundation Model, co-created with community members who contributed their language, knowledge, and lived experience, was officially launched by Shri Devendra Fadnavis, Hon’ble Chief Minister of Maharashtra during the AI4Agri Global Summit 2026. The model is now integrated into the MahaVISTAAR AI application, a digital platform serving approximately 13 million farmers across Maharashtra, providing access to agricultural information and services. It is also available through the Bhashini app, expanding access to Bhili language interfaces. These integrations matter for two reasons. Farmers can access critical information in their own language. And communities participate directly in shaping the systems built to serve them. This work reflects a broader approach to language technology. Low resource languages cannot be an afterthought. They require deliberate documentation, structured evaluation, and community partnership. We extend our sincere thanks to Shri Parimal Singh (IAS) – POCRA, District Collector Shri Dr Mittali Sethi (IAS), Nandurbar, Shri Amitabh Nag – BHASHINI - (Digital India BHASHINI Division), Mitesh Khapra - AI4Bhārat, and EkStep Foundation for their support and collaboration. This milestone is part of a longer effort to enable more such language integrations in partnership with governments and communities. The work continues. AI and AgriTech Innovation Center (AIAIC)
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Supriya Paul reacted on thisSupriya Paul reacted on thisWomen’s Day was interesting for us at Coluxe Fine Jewellery We hosted a brunch with Dildeep Kalra at the newly renovated #FarziCafe in CyberHub Gurgaon. We invited an eclectic group of women, some as friends, some as clients, some as investors, some simply as supporters of the journey. What made the room special was the mix of women who came through. Founders, operators, investors, builders. Women at different stages of their journeys but all very much in their own mode of hustle. Women’s Day can sometimes feel like a day of nice words, wishes, panels, posts and platitudes. But the real signal is different. It is rooms where women show up for each other. Where introductions get made. Where someone becomes a client, someone becomes an investor, someone simply becomes a supporter. Deals are discussed and war stories exchanged. That is how ecosystems actually get built. Not through declarations, but through networks that quietly form around trust, belief and shared ambition. Yesterday felt like one of those moments. And that meant a lot. #ColuxeLoveStories Aishwarya Malhi Radhika Ghai Manasa Garemella Supriya Paul Megha Vishwanath Fatima Mahdi Karan Srishti Sharda Prerna Seemar Kalra Pushpa Bector Ayushi Gudwani Kaavya Bector Desiree Anwar Aditi Pasari Shreedha Bhargava Shivaarti Bajaj Nina Kler Stuti Jalan Arpana Shahi
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Supriya Paul reacted on thisSupriya Paul reacted on thisA week of curated conversations, colors, and quiet inspiration... Last week was one of those weeks that makes you pause and reflect on the many threads that come together to build the journey of Women Inspiring Network and Crosshairs Communication. It began in a whirlwind with a podcast conversation on #WINVOICES with Abhishek Singh, CEO of the IndiaAI Mission. We spoke about AI, the future that is unfolding around us, and why it is so important that women are part of shaping that future. Same day we hosted a thoughtful roundtable with The Body Shop India on the theme “Beauty Begins Within.” It became a warm and honest conversation about confidence, identity, and the quiet strength women carry within themselves. Holi arrived in between, bringing colour, laughter, and a slightly shorter four-day work week. Another special moment was recording a podcast with one of India’s most celebrated contemporary painters, Paresh Maity. Our conversation flowed through art, creativity, and the subtle but powerful presence of women in the world of inspiration. Meeting Dr Ajay Kumar, Chairman of UPSC, for our podcast. was equally memorable. When asked about his inspiration, he fondly spoke about how his mother, his wife, and his daughter inspire him, and that was so endearing. Interestingly, during the week of International Women’s Day we recorded three podcasts, and all of them were with men. Yet every conversation circled back to the women who shaped them. It felt like a quiet reminder that the story of women’s empowerment is also carried forward by the men who recognise and celebrate it. This March also brought a personal moment of gratitude with the Women Inspire Award from Peak Life Magazine for the work we are building through Women Inspiring Network. It felt less like an award and more like encouragement to keep going. Parineeta Sethi There were also warm gatherings along the way. A Women’s Day brunch hosted by Priyanka Gill where I met inspiring leaders like Pushpa Bector Aishwarya Malhi Supriya Paul Aditi Pasari Arpana Shahi Through #AIbyHER for HER, we celebrated innovators building solutions that truly matter. Congratulations to Farmer Lifeline, Periwinkle Technologies, Volar Alta, and Remidio for the important work they are doing. At Raffles Jaipur, we brought together leading women entrepreneurs for a beautiful IWD celebration titled “The Queen Within.” At this legacy hotel, their CEO Ranju Alex continues to raise the banner of women in hospitality leadership in India and beyond. Nitya Bajaj Gayatri Jolly Aggarwal Ainee Nizami Ahmedi Jui Kulkarni Sharma In totality, it was a week filled with conversations across art, technology, leadership, and community. And it reminded me of this quote by Rumi, “When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.” Shriti Malhotra Harmeet Singh Vaishali Sharma Prof Sudha Sarin Aparna Bhawal Priyanka Gulati Shailja Dutt #winatindia #womeninspirinwomen #internationalwomensday
Experience & Education
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Josh Talks
View Supriya’s full experience
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Volunteer Experience
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Torchbearer
TERI University
- 1 year 1 month
Environment
A torchbearer for the Light a Billion Lives initiative that focussed on introducing solar energy lanterns across 5 villages in Rajasthan and assessing the benefits of solar energy over the use of non renewable resources like coal.
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Teacher
Apna School
- 3 months
Education
Worked as a teacher for a month in a local community school for the underprivileged and focussed on teaching through creative arts rather than mainstream book education.
Courses
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Spanish Level 1
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Spanish Level 2
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Honors & Awards
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Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia
Forbes
Listed in the "Forbes 30 Under 30" Asia for Media and Marketing.
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Most Influential Youth Marketing Leader'18
World Brand Congress
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SheThePeople Digital Women Award'17
SheThePeople TV
Recipient of SheThePeople Digital Women Award in 2017 for Best Content Creation.
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WEF'17 Award- "Iconic Women Creating a Better World for All"
WEF- Women Economic Forum
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Young Entrepreneur of the Year- Women in Business Award'17
Indo Global SME Chamber
Languages
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Hindi
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English
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Spanish
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