NEW DELHI: Google on Monday announced a series of new Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based initiatives for India, aimed at addressing the language divide on the Internet, supporting the digitisation of farmland in partnership with the Telangana Government, and new collaborations and investments to drive responsible development of AI across the country.
New innovations were focused on bilingual users’ needs and new search capabilities using camera and voice, a new fraud detection model for secure digital payments on Google Pay, and integration with Digilocker in the files by Google app on Android to allow for easy access to key digital documents, privately and safely.
Positioning Indian language support on the Internet as the next big unlock for India’s digital transformation journey, Google announced a collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru (Project Vaani), to capture diverse Indian dialects for building better AI language models.
It said this collaboration is aimed at collecting and transcribing open-source speech data from across all of India’s 773 districts, making it available through the government of India’s Bhashini project.
Sanjay Gupta, Country Head and Vice President, of Google India, delivering his keynote address at its annual flagship Google For India event held here in the national capital, said: “As partners in India’s digital transformation for nearly two decades, we are deeply inspired by the myriad ways people have woven technology into every aspect of their everyday lives, placing India’s digital transformation at a tipping point.”
“As access continues to broaden, connectivity must become rewarding for all people everywhere, and enable everyone to seamlessly move up the digital value chain for individual progress. We’re excited to launch concerted efforts with AI to democratize this opportunity and solve for languages, security, and transformation of scaled sectors such as agriculture and healthcare,” Gupta said, adding that under the Google for India Digitization fund, it will continue to support the innovation ecosystem with a commitment to support early-stage and women-led start-ups.
Manish Gupta, Director – of Research, Google India said that over the past three years since Google Research was launched in India with a focus on building technology solutions that can create a meaningful impact for a billion Indians.
“We look forward to working closely with our ecosystem partners as we continue to responsibly deploy Google’s AI and Machine Learning innovations towards answering big societal needs – from democratizing access to information by enabling more inclusive and powerful Indian language capabilities, to working with the Telangana state government to utilize remote sensing for a deeper understanding of India’s farmlands, to helping digitize medical prescriptions by way of an assistive tool which can be used on a smartphone,” Gupta added.
At the event, Liz Reid, Vice President, of Google Search said that the investments for over a decade have helped it take consistent strides towards building a search experience that’s accessible and useful to everyone in India.
“Today, India is at the forefront of visual and voice search adoption, consuming content in different languages, and there is still tremendous opportunity to meet people’s information needs. With advances in AI, we’re making Search more helpful than ever by introducing new India-first and India-focused innovations that enable more people to navigate the internet in ways that are most natural and intuitive to them,” Reid added. (ANI)