ANVE: the private AI office, on the record. See what that means

ANVE

Offline AI in your language · updated 2026-10-16

Can offline AI handle Kannada?
ಕನ್ನಡ in speech, text and translation, and why conversational translation scores drop.

Short answer. Yes for text, with care for speech and for conversational translation. Whisper’s paper counts 3.8 hours of Kannada training audio and reports 37.0% word error rate on read sentences (FLEURS, large-v2), but a Whisper model scored 96.5% on natural speech in the IndicVoices paper against 30.3% for AI4Bharat’s IndicASR. In the MILU exam test Kannada was the highest-scoring Indian language for the Llama 3.1 70B base model, at 68.37%. Translation needs care: IndicTrans2 scored 51.0 chrF++ from English to Kannada on web text but only 33.8 on conversational sentences. Qwen3 lists Kannada; Meta’s Llama cards do not. ANVE has not tested Kannada yet. Coverage and figures are as of October 2026.

01

What open models cover in Kannada

TaskModelsWhat the source says
Speech to text: WhisperWhisper large-v2, large-v3The Whisper paper counts 3.8 hours of Kannada speech with Kannada transcripts and 90 hours paired with English text. Large-v2 scored 37.0% word error rate on FLEURS. The large-v3 card gives no Kannada figure.
Speech to text: Indian-language modelsIndicConformer, IndicWhisper, Meta MMSIndicConformer lists Kannada (MIT licence). IndicWhisper averages 18.3% on Kannada test sets, the third lowest of its 12 languages after Hindi and Marathi. IndicVoices, natural speech: IndicASR 30.3% (trained on 50 hours), MMS 70.7%, Whisper 96.5%.
Chat, summaries, draftingQwen3, Gemma, Sarvam, LlamaQwen3’s launch post lists Kannada. The Llama 3.3 and 4 cards and the gpt-oss card list or test no Kannada. MILU (2024 test, Indian exam questions; open base models, 5-shot): Llama 3.1 70B 68.37%, its best of ten Indian languages, Gemma 2 27B 63.43%, and the closed GPT-4o 76.93%. Sarvam-1 and Sarvam-M name Kannada.
TranslationIndicTrans2, NLLB-200IndicTrans2 paper (2023), chrF++, English to Kannada: 51.0 on web and Wikipedia sentences (IN22-Gen), 33.8 on conversational ones (IN22-Conv), the biggest drop of any language between its two tables, by our comparison. Kannada to English: 64.2 and 47.5. NLLB 1.2B distilled scored 32.2 and 45.3 on the conversational set; the commercial systems in the paper scored about the same.
02

Kannada script, Karnataka and its neighbours

Kannada (ಕನ್ನಡ) has its own script. The 2011 Census counted 4,37,06,512 people with Kannada as their mother tongue, 3.61% of India and the eighth largest group. Karnataka had 4,06,51,090. Tamil Nadu had 12,86,175, Maharashtra 10,00,463 and Andhra Pradesh, as in 2011, 5,34,144. The Census groups the Badaga language, 1,33,550 speakers, under Kannada.

Karnataka’s offices are multilingual. The same Census table counted 66,18,324 Urdu, 35,69,400 Telugu, 21,10,128 Tamil, 20,64,906 Marathi and 7,88,294 Konkani speakers in the state. Konkani is often written in Kannada script there, and none of the sources tests mixed-language Kannada speech.

For English meetings, the Svarah paper measured Whisper large at 6.6% word error rate on speakers whose mother tongue is Kannada, against 5.3% for native Hindi speakers.

03

What to test before you rely on it

  • Record unscripted speech. The gap between Whisper’s 37.0% on read sentences and 96.5% on natural speech is the most useful comparison on this page.
  • Translate real conversational sentences, not only formal text. For Kannada, every system in the IndicTrans2 table scores far lower on conversation than on web text, so judge with your own chat and meeting lines.
  • Check Kannada digits (೧ ೨ ೩ against 1 2 3), rupee amounts, dates and the spelling of place names.
  • If staff also speak Hindi, Telugu or Tamil in the same meeting, test those switches; the Kannada results above do not cover them.
  • Ask a Kannada reader to mark errors in a translated notice in both directions before anything goes outside the office.
04

Where ANVE stands

Only Hindi, English and Hinglish are handled by ANVE’s meeting-minutes maker today. Kannada is untested on ANVE, so there is no ANVE result to report and nothing here promises support.

New open models appear often. On ANVE, updating is a deliberate step: ANVEAI installs updates on site today, signed packages applied offline by USB are not on ANVE yet, and nothing updates itself over the internet.

A demo call is free. If Kannada decides your purchase, ask for your own recordings to be tried before you commit.

05

Questions people ask

Can Whisper transcribe Kannada?
It accepts Kannada. Large-v2 scored 37.0% word error rate on read FLEURS sentences with 3.8 hours of Kannada training audio, and a Whisper model scored 96.5% on natural Kannada speech in the IndicVoices paper. Test on real meetings.
Which open language models handle Kannada?
Qwen3 lists Kannada, and Sarvam’s smaller models name it. Meta’s Llama 3.3 and 4 cards do not list it. In the 2024 MILU exam test, the Llama 3.1 70B base model scored 68.37% on Kannada, its highest of ten Indian languages.
Why are Kannada conversational translation scores low?
The IndicTrans2 paper reports 33.8 chrF++ from English to Kannada on conversational sentences, against 51.0 on web text, and the commercial systems in its table scored about the same, so the conversational set is hard for every system. The paper does not say why.
Is Kannada-script Konkani covered?
Not in these sources. AI4Bharat’s IndicTrans2 lists Konkani in Devanagari only, although Konkani is also written in Kannada script in Karnataka. See the Konkani page.
06

What is not real yet

No sealed ANVE unit exists; every image of the appliance on this site is a labelled render. The software runs today on a development machine. No customers yet, no certifications, no delivery date, and the final price is not announced.

Reservations are ₹999 in India or US$12 elsewhere, refundable in full until you confirm an order in writing (terms). Offices that cannot use cloud AI can apply to be one of ten design partners.

07

Sources