Voice AI Expansion Faces Consent, Data Law Concerns

New Delhi: India’s ambitious push to build an open and inclusive voice technology ecosystem has brought renewed attention to legal and governance challenges surrounding data use, consent and intellectual property.

At the India AI Summit Expo 2026, the Ministry of Electronics & IT, through the Digital India BHASHINI Division, released two key documents titled Building an Open and Responsible Voice Technology Ecosystem: Policy Recommendations for Digital Inclusion in India and Indic Voice Technologies for an Inclusive Digital India: Toolkit for Developers.

The policy report identifies structural gaps in India’s speech technology landscape, including uneven data representation across languages, weak quality assurance systems, limited evaluation practices and fragmented governance structures. It notes that models trained on narrow datasets risk excluding large segments of India’s linguistically diverse population.

The Developers’ Toolkit recommends a lifecycle based approach that addresses challenges from data collection and annotation to model training, deployment and governance.

It calls on developers to maintain data documentation practices such as datacards and model cards, ensure representative sampling and embed responsible AI principles from the design stage.

The toolkit also underscores the need for clear and unambiguous consent obtained through affirmative action in compliance with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. It stresses that developers must ensure lawful data sourcing and proper licensing under the Copyright Act, 1957, especially when using copyrighted voice recordings, transcripts or metadata.

Subimal Bhattacharjee digital policy expert and an author of ‘The Digital Decade: Thirty years of Internet in India’ said that the consent centric structure of India’s data protection regime has significant implications for developers who rely on publicly available audio content.

“The DPDP Act operates on a foundation of explicit consent as the primary and essentially the only lawful basis for processing personal data,” Bhattacharjee said. “Unlike the GDPR, there is no legitimate interests ground to fall back on.”

He added that scraping podcasts or interviews for AI training may not meet statutory consent standards. “You cannot obtain free, specific, informed consent from someone whose podcast or interview you are harvesting for training data. The direct relationship the Rules presuppose simply does not exist in that scenario,” he said.

He further added- “Full substantive obligations including notice requirements, security protocols, and Data Principal rights kick in only at Stage 3, around May 2027. This gives developers an 18-month runway to restructure data practices, but it doesn’t grandfather existing scraped datasets. The Data Protection Board is already constituted and can act on complaints now.”

Developers have three realistic paths: build on consented datasets (Common Voice, licensed corpora), generate synthetic training data, or negotiate direct licensing deals with content producers.

Operating on scraped audio is now materially riskier post-Rules- not just legally uncertain but potentially Board-actionable once May 2027 compliance kicks in. The copyright exposure runs in parallel and it won’t wait for regulatory clarity.

The DPDP Rules don’t touch copyright at all, so the collision between performer rights (Section 38, Copyright Act), sound recording rights (Section 13), and potential derivative work claims on transcripts remains entirely unresolved.

Training on a voice recording likely constitutes reproduction, but the courts in India haven’t ruled on whether model weights qualify. Transcription doesn’t solve the rights problem it creates a new one, he noted.

The government documents further recommend the adoption of privacy enhancing technologies, minimisation of personally identifiable information, and structured governance mechanisms to prevent misuse while enabling innovation.

India positions voice technologies as a foundational layer of its digital public infrastructure, experts say the success of the ecosystem will depend on aligning innovation with compliance. With regulatory oversight mechanisms already in place and phased compliance obligations expected to tighten in the coming years, developers may need to reassess data sourcing strategies to mitigate legal and operational risks.