At the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi in 2026, Emvo announced the launch of voiceSHIELD, India’s first open-source secure speech-to-text model created to protect voice AI systems from malicious audio inputs in real time. The model addresses rising threats such as voice-based prompt injection, social engineering attacks, and unsafe audio content, offering a security-focused foundation for enterprises and developers building voice agents, call center solutions, and conversational AI platforms.
As voice interfaces are rapidly adopted across industries, organizations are becoming vulnerable to new types of threats that originate directly from spoken inputs. Most existing AI security tools concentrate on text and APIs, leaving voice systems exposed to manipulation, data extraction attempts, and adversarial speech. Limited visibility and the lack of real-time protection make voice AI deployments especially risky in production environments.
voiceSHIELD provides a targeted solution by detecting malicious speech while simultaneously generating transcripts in real time. Built on the Whisper architecture, the model performs both classification and transcription in a single forward pass, achieving low latency of 90 to 120 milliseconds on mid-range GPUs. This enables enterprises to filter or sanitize unsafe audio before it reaches downstream large language models or voice agents.
The model is designed for real-time voice security applications such as call center monitoring, voice assistants, and agentic AI systems. It supports standard audio formats and delivers transcripts, threat labels, and confidence scores in a single, unified output. With around 88 million parameters, the system achieves high accuracy and low false-positive rates while maintaining production-level performance for live voice environments.
Developed as an open-source project, voiceSHIELD allows enterprises, researchers, and developers to inspect, test, and enhance the model. The system was architected and led by Emvo’s CTO and Co-founder, Sumit Ranjan, whose work focuses on sovereign AI development and improving model security and reliability through fine-tuning, with a strong emphasis on responsible innovation. By releasing the model openly, Emvo aims to accelerate responsible AI adoption and strengthen the voice security ecosystem through community collaboration.
“Voice interfaces are becoming the primary entry point to AI systems, yet voice security has largely been overlooked,” said Vaibhav Anand, CEO of Emvo. “With voiceSHIELD, we are providing the community with a real-time, open-source foundation for building secure and responsible voice AI systems at scale.”
“Real-time voice security requires architectural approaches that differ significantly from text-based systems,” said Sumit Ranjan. “voiceSHIELD was designed to deliver both speed and reliability, allowing enterprises to deploy voice AI with confidence while maintaining strong security controls.”
“Open-source security models are essential for creating sovereign and trustworthy AI ecosystems,” said Saurabh Kumar, Head of Growth and Co-founder at Emvo. “By releasing voiceSHIELD, we are enabling enterprises and developers to take ownership of their voice AI security stack while contributing to responsible innovation.”