On the back of the recently launched UPI 123 Pay, ToneTag's voice-first solution has expanded its offerings in regional languages to bridge the gap in the accessibility of digital payments in rural India. Further to the rollout of VoiceSe UPI digital payments for feature phone users earlier this year, the company is now offering voice-enabled digital payments. It is available in languages like Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada and Bengali and will soon be available in Gujarati, Marathi and Punjabi. 

VoiceSe has partnered with NSDL Payments Bank and National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to boost digitisation and enhance safe online transactions for feature phones. This will allow India's 40 crore feature phone users to access the payment services, making it accessible to a larger part of the rural Indian audience. 

Users can call the IVR number ‘6366 200 200' to proceed with their choice of financial transaction in a preferred language. This secure payment service enables customers to make fund transfers and assists them in paying utility bills, balance enquiries and FASTag activation or recharge using their voice.

The current market size for voice technology is valued at $9.4 billion. It is projected to reach $28.1 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 24.4 per cent from 2022 to 2027.  

Vivek Singh, co-founder and director of labs at ToneTag, said, "We are looking at voice technology that goes beyond Siri and Alexa to enable digital payment solutions that are not necessarily dependent on 100 per cent digital literacy or smartphone penetration. In less than two months of the launch, we have on-boarded over 1 lakh users on the platform and witnessed more than 2 lakh transactions."