Pune has the same reputation problem Bangalore has, just one size down: IT parks, engineering colleges, a genuinely large English-fluent population, and a citywide assumption that follows from it — that businesses here don't need Marathi support because everyone just defaults to English anyway. Nagpur doesn't even get that assumption; it gets overlooked entirely, despite being Maharashtra's second capital and a real commercial center in its own right, because it doesn't have Pune's tech-hub branding.
Both cities run on Marathi at the level that actually matters for a small business: the customer calling a clinic, a salon, or a service business to ask a question or book something. And in both cities, there's a specific, testable reason voice surfaces that reality better than text does.
Typing habit hides language preference. Speaking doesn't.
Ask someone in Pune what language they'd prefer to chat in, and a lot of people will say English — not because they think in English, but because their phone keyboard defaults to English, switching input languages is friction, and typing in Marathi, in script or transliterated, takes more effort than typing in English. That habit has nothing to do with what language they'd rather actually use. It's a keyboard problem wearing a language-preference costume.
Put the same person on a phone call and the keyboard friction disappears. People speak the language they think in, by default, without the extra step of choosing an input method. That's why a voice channel tells you the truth about language preference in a way a chat log usually doesn't — and why a business that only measures "what language do customers type in" is measuring the wrong thing.
A chat transcript full of English doesn't mean your customers prefer English. It might just mean typing Marathi is annoying enough that they didn't bother. A phone call doesn't have that distortion.
Pune's IT-park assumption, tested
The assumption breaks down the moment you look at who's actually calling, not who's employed in the city. An IT professional in Hinjewadi might run their entire work life in English, but their parent calling a diagnostic lab about a report, or their building's society office calling a maintenance contractor, is a completely different caller with a completely different language comfort level. A city's English-fluency reputation describes a slice of its workforce, not its phone-calling population as a whole — and a clinic, salon, or coaching centre serves the whole population, not just the slice that shows up in a "Pune is an IT city" headline.
Nagpur: a real commercial center, not a footnote
Nagpur doesn't get Pune's tech-hub branding, but it's Maharashtra's second capital, the state's winter-session seat of government, and a genuine wholesale and logistics hub sitting close to the geographic center of India — which is exactly why so much trading and distribution business runs through it. None of that changes what language its actual customers call in. A hardware or auto-parts wholesaler in Nagpur's Itwari market, a trading office during the citrus season the city is famous for, a coaching centre prepping students for board exams — all of it runs on Marathi phone calls, the same as anywhere else in the state, regardless of whether the city gets mentioned in the same breath as Pune or Mumbai.
What this looks like in practice
A clinic in Kothrud fielding appointment calls where the patient speaks Marathi and the chat widget, if anyone used it, would show up in English by typing default. A textile or auto-parts business in Nagpur's wholesale market, where calls are the primary channel and always have been. A coaching centre in either city where "what time is tomorrow's batch" gets asked in Marathi on the phone, all day, regardless of what language the center's website is in.
AIVA's Marathi is trained on real spoken Marathi — including the code-switching with English that's completely normal in both cities — and replies at around 198ms on average, detected from the caller's first sentence, no menu required.
A closer look at the code-switching
Marathi in both cities rarely stays pure Marathi for a whole call. A caller might ask a question in Marathi, quote an English price or product name, and close with a Hindi phrase picked up from years of cross-state migration and shared media — all in one breath, without treating it as unusual. AIVA is trained on that real mixing pattern rather than a textbook version of Marathi that assumes a caller sticks to one language for the length of a call. Getting the mix right matters most exactly where the call gets specific — a price, a date, a product name — because that's usually where the switch happens, and losing the thread there is the difference between a booked appointment and a caller who has to repeat themselves.
Two calls, one Tuesday afternoon
Picture a physiotherapy clinic in Kothrud. The first caller wants to know if a specific type of sports injury needs a doctor's referral before booking — a policy question, asked and answered entirely in Marathi. Twenty minutes later, a second caller is rescheduling a session for an elderly parent, mixing Marathi for the explanation with an English phrase for the specific treatment name their doctor used. AIVA handles both the way a Marathi-speaking front-desk staffer would — not translating internally and hoping the tone survives, but actually following the conversation as it's spoken, switch included.
Checking what your own calls actually look like
You don't need to guess how much of your call volume is genuinely Marathi versus English. AIVA's analytics dashboard tags the language of every conversation once it's running, even during a short pilot, so a business that assumed it was "mostly English" based on its WhatsApp inbox or website contact form gets an actual number instead. For a lot of businesses in both cities, that number ends up being a genuine surprise — not because the Marathi-speaking customers weren't calling before, but because nothing was ever measuring which language they were calling in.
The same detection applies to AIVA's web chat widget, too — a visitor typing in Marathi gets answered in Marathi, not routed through an English-only bot that happens to have a Marathi label on the tab. Between voice and chat, a business gets a genuinely complete picture of what language its customers actually want, not just the language its website happens to be written in.
What it costs, and what happens when a call needs a person
None of this changes what AIVA costs — pricing is pay-as-you-go at ₹4 a minute for voice, ₹2 per web chat conversation, and ₹1 per SMS, with ₹500 in free credit and no card required to start. And when a call genuinely needs a person — a complaint, a situation that needs real judgment — AIVA hands off with the Marathi conversation's context already captured, so the caller isn't asked to explain themselves twice. Here's how that handoff actually works.
The number that actually matters
About 96% of AIVA's voice calls get resolved without a human joining in — the FAQ answered, the appointment booked. That number holds regardless of whether the business is in a "tech city" like Pune or a city that doesn't get the tech-city label like Nagpur, because the caller on the other end of the line doesn't care about either reputation. They care whether someone answered, in Marathi, and got their question handled. The same holds across all 12 of AIVA's supported languages, not just Marathi.
Hear the difference
Hear how AIVA sounds on a real call — in Marathi or any of the eleven other languages — before deciding whether your business needs it. Or call +91 96623 20707 directly and switch to Marathi yourself, or start free with ₹500 credit and no card required.