San Francisco, June 19 -- For OpenAI, India is not just a market for acquiring users but also a crucial testing ground for future artificial intelligence products, including a personalized voice-interaction feature set to launch in the coming weeks, according to Abhi Muchhal, its product lead for international growth.

The US company is setting up a bigger engineering team in the country to train a multilingual voice assistant that understands how people speak in the real world-a key part of its push towards artificial general intelligence (AGI) amid intensifying competition with Anthropic and Google.

It's a "mission-critical" objective to get a deeper understanding of diverse languages beyond English, Muchhal said in an interview with M...