Zoho Corporation has announced a major expansion of its artificial intelligence (AI) offerings, including its own large language models (Zia LLM), speech-to-text systems for English and Hindi, and new AI-powered tools to help businesses automate tasks. These tools are being introduced to improve everyday work across different departments like sales, customer support, and data analysis.

Sridhar Vembu, Chief Scientist at Zoho, shared the news on X, saying, “Our big AI announcement today. First, Zia LLM with 3 completely home-grown models with 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion and 7 billion parameters, that focus on various business use cases. Second, two completely home grown automatic speech to text models for English and Hindi, optimised to perform with high accuracy in relatively modest hardware.”

“We will support other Indian languages over time. Third, AI Agent Studio and a variety of pre-built agents that rely on a choice of open source or commercial LLM APIs, and customers can choose the LLMs they want to use. Fourth, Zoho MCP Server for interoperability,” added Vembu.

The Zia LLM has been developed completely in-house using NVIDIA’s AI platform. The models were trained with real business tasks in mind, such as summarising reports, extracting data, answering questions, and writing code. The three different model sizes allow Zoho to match the right AI power to the right job.

Zoho has also launched two speech recognition models for converting spoken English and Hindi into text. These are designed to work well even on devices with limited computing power, while still delivering accurate results. More Indian and European languages will be added in the future.

To help companies use AI more easily, Zoho introduced Zia Agent Studio, a tool that allows users to create their own AI assistants (agents) without coding. These agents can carry out tasks automatically, respond to customer queries, or help teams with analysis. Over 700 built-in actions are available across Zoho’s product suite.

The Agent Marketplace, now live within Zoho’s platform, offers more than 25 pre-made AI agents. These include:

• Customer Service Agent: Handles and routes customer support requests.
• Candidate Screener: Ranks job applicants based on required skills and experience.
• Deal Analyser: Reviews sales deals and suggests next steps.
• Revenue Growth Specialist: Identifies ways to upsell and cross-sell to customers.

Developers and partners will also be able to build their own agents and share them on the Marketplace soon.

Another part of the announcement is the Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server, which allows AI agents to access actions and data across more than 15 Zoho apps. This is meant to help different AI systems work together while respecting user privacy and permission settings.

These new AI tools are currently being tested by early access users. General availability is expected by the end of 2025. Pricing will be shared closer to the full launch.

Zoho said that its AI systems are not trained on customer data and are designed with privacy in mind. The company plans to improve its AI tools further, by increasing model sizes, adding support for more languages, and introducing new types of models that can reason and solve more complex problems.