What Hanooman is and who is behind it
Hanooman is an Indian multilingual AI assistant developed under the BharatGPT group initiative, with SML, or Seetha Mahalaxmi Healthcare, as the commercial partner behind the consumer rollout. The project emerged from a collaboration involving IIT Bombay and other Indian institutions under the broader BharatGPT ecosystem, and it was launched with an explicit mission: build an assistant that works across a very wide set of Indian languages, with particular attention to education and healthcare.
That origin is worth pausing on. Hanooman is not a Silicon Valley product adapted for India, and it is not primarily a general-purpose chatbot chasing consumer engagement metrics. It began as an academic and public-interest effort with a domain focus, and the consumer app is the most visible output of that work.
Where it sits in India's sovereign AI push
India's IndiaAI Mission has driven a wave of domestic model building, and Hanooman is one of the more visible names alongside Krutrim, Sarvam and CoRover's BharatGPT. The rationale for all of them is the same. Global models are trained overwhelmingly on English data, underserve Indian languages, tokenise Indian scripts inefficiently, and are hosted outside Indian jurisdiction. For a country where most people do not work comfortably in English, that is both a usability problem and a strategic one.
Hanooman's particular contribution to that effort is breadth of language coverage combined with a domain lens. Rather than trying to be the best general assistant in India, it aims to be useful in the two areas where language access has the highest social value: learning and health information. Whether it succeeds at that is a fair question, and the answer today is partly.
Key features in depth
Indian language coverage, the headline claim
Language breadth is Hanooman's most frequently cited feature. The project has been promoted around support for a very wide set of Indian languages, well beyond the handful that most assistants handle properly, spanning Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Gujarati, Punjabi, Odia, Assamese and a long tail of others alongside English.
A fair reviewer has to add a caveat here. Supporting a language and being genuinely good in it are different claims. In practice, Hanooman is noticeably more capable in Hindi, Marathi and English than in the smaller languages, where answers can become short, generic or awkwardly translated. Breadth is real; depth is uneven. That is true of every Indic model currently available, including the better funded ones, but it matters most for a product whose main pitch is breadth.
Education focus
The education angle is where Hanooman feels most deliberate. It is built to explain concepts, answer study questions and support learners working in their own language rather than in English. For a student in a Hindi-medium or Marathi-medium school who has been forced to learn from English resources, an assistant that will patiently explain a concept in their own language is genuinely valuable, even when the explanation is imperfect.
Healthcare information
Given SML's healthcare background, Hanooman has been positioned with health information capability, offering general health guidance in Indian languages. This should be treated with appropriate caution by users and reviewers alike. General health information in a regional language is useful. Diagnosis is not something any consumer AI assistant should be doing, and Hanooman is no exception. Use it to understand terms and general guidance, then see a doctor.
Voice and everyday assistant tasks
The app supports voice input, which matters for users who type slowly in Indic scripts or not at all, and covers the ordinary assistant surface: questions, short drafting, summarising and explanation.
Pricing for Indian users
The Hanooman consumer app is free. You download it, sign in, and use it without a subscription. There is no paid consumer tier gating the useful features, and no card required.
That is the correct model for what this product is trying to do. An assistant whose purpose is to widen access to information for Hindi-medium students and non-English speakers in smaller towns cannot sensibly charge Rs 1,999 a month. Free removes the only barrier that would have mattered.
On the commercial side, the BharatGPT and SML group has talked about enterprise and domain deployments, particularly in healthcare and education contexts. For a small business or an institution such as a school group or clinic chain, that means there is no published rate card and you would need to approach them for a quote. The practical advice is the same as with any Indian enterprise AI vendor: arrive with your expected volume, your required languages and your integration needs written down, ask for a narrowly scoped paid pilot rather than an annual contract, and ask explicitly what support and uptime you are buying. If the answers are vague, treat that as information.
How Hanooman compares to its main rivals
| Factor | Hanooman | ChatGPT | Gemini |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost for an individual | Free | Free tier, paid around Rs 1,999 a month | Free tier, paid in a similar band |
| Breadth of Indian languages | Very broad on paper | Major languages well | Broad, heavy Indic investment |
| Hindi output quality | Reasonable for everyday use | Generally stronger and more consistent | Generally stronger |
| Smaller Indic languages | Covered but shallow | Weaker coverage | Better than most, still imperfect |
| Education explanations | A deliberate focus | Strong generally | Strong generally |
| Reasoning, maths, coding | Basic | Very strong | Very strong |
| App polish and reliability | Rough in places | Very polished | Very polished |
The honest reading is that ChatGPT and Gemini still produce better Hindi and better Indic output than Hanooman on most tasks that require length, structure or accuracy. Google's investment in Indian languages in particular is substantial and visible. Where Hanooman earns its place is that it is free, that it will attempt languages the global tools handle thinly, and that its education framing suits a student audience the global tools were not designed around. Those are worthwhile advantages. They are not the same as being better.
Real workflows where Hanooman fits
A Hindi-medium student. Someone preparing for board exams who wants a concept explained in Hindi rather than translated from an English textbook. Ask, read, then verify against the textbook. This is the clearest fit for the product.
A rural or small-town user seeking health information. A person who wants to understand what a prescribed medicine does or what a diagnosis term means, in their own language, before or after a doctor's visit. Useful for comprehension, never for decisions.
A Tier-2 city small business. A shop owner drafting a customer message or a simple advertisement in Marathi or Gujarati without paying for a subscription.
A teacher in a regional-language school. Preparing simple explanations, question sets or worksheets in the language of instruction, then editing them before use.
A regional-language content creator. Drafting captions and short scripts in an Indian language, with human polish afterwards.
A curious first-time AI user. Someone in an Indian language who has never used an assistant and finds an Indian-branded free app less intimidating than a foreign one. Lowering that first barrier has real value.
Limitations to know
Be realistic. Hanooman is a young product from a young initiative, and output quality lags the global leaders across most tasks. Answers can be short, generic or thin, particularly in the smaller languages where the support claim is broadest. Factual accuracy needs checking every time, and this applies with extra force to anything health related.
The app experience has been criticised as rough, with slowness, occasional failures and interface inconsistencies. Documentation is thin. Public information about the models, training data and evaluation is limited, and independent third-party assessment of quality is scarce, which makes any capability claim, including the language count, difficult to verify from outside. There has also been some public confusion about branding and ownership across the BharatGPT and SML association, which does not help users understand what they are actually using.
None of this makes it a bad product for a free tool with a social mission. It does mean you should not build anything important on it, and you should verify anything that matters.
How to get started
- Download the Hanooman app from the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store, or use the web version if available in your region.
- Sign in with your mobile number and complete the OTP step.
- Set or state your preferred language at the start of the conversation rather than assuming it will detect it.
- Begin with a simple study or explanation task in your own language, since that is where the product is strongest.
- Try voice input if typing in your script is slow, which is often the more comfortable route.
- Verify anything factual against a textbook, an official source or a professional, and never act on health information without a doctor.
- Run the same question through a free global assistant for a fortnight and compare. Use whichever actually helps you more, and do not let national branding decide it for you.