Google has announced a series of new initiatives in India to address the language divide on the Internet and support the digitization of farmland at the 8th Google for India event. These initiatives, which are focused on the use of artificial intelligence (AI), include a collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru (Project Vaani) to collect and transcribe open-source speech data from across India’s 773 districts. The data will be made available through the Indian government’s Bhashini project in the future.
Delivering his keynote, at its annual flagship Google For India event held in New Delhi, Sanjay Gupta, Country Head and Vice President of Google India, said, “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. And under the Google for India Digitization fund, we continue to support the innovation ecosystem with a commitment to support early-stage and women-led start-ups.”
In addition to this, Google has also announced a collaboration with the Telangana government to support the digitization of farmland through AI. This will involve the development of new technologies and tools to help farmers better manage their land and crops, as well as to improve the efficiency and sustainability of agriculture in the region.
To support the responsible development of AI in India, Google has also announced a grant of $1 million to the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras. The grant will help to establish India’s first Center for Responsible AI, which will focus on research, education, and outreach in the field.
In recognition of the significant increase in India’s digital adoption, Google has also announced the Google for India Digitization Fund, which will provide support for early-stage and women-led start-ups in the country. This fund will help to drive innovation and entrepreneurship in the digital sector, and will also help to support the development of new technologies and services that are relevant and useful to Indian users.
Bikram Bedi, of Google Cloud India, took to the stage to speak about the company’s cloud technology. Bedi was followed by Elizabeth Reid, VP of search at Google. After Reid, Ishan John Chatterjee, managing director for YouTube India spoke about YouTube Courses. After Chatterjee, Google VP Royal Hansen took to stage.
Google Cloud is partnering with Apollo Hospitals to help build a clinical intelligence platform, which the company says can be used to help with patient care and diagnosis with the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. In addition, to this, Google’s Cloud business has continued to engage in many private and public sector partnerships over the past year.
Google to integrate Digilocker in Files app to access official documents in India
Google announced that it will integrate “DigiLocker”, a government-issued document storage service, into the Files app on Android so users can access government-verified documents from the app in India.
Integration with DigiLocker for govt identity documents using AI to identify and recognise important documents on the Google Files app
It can recognise govt issued documents and neatly arrange them in a folder. Only the user can access these documents and all this data is stored locally on the device. All Android phones will have DigiLocker built into them.
In addition to this, Google has also announced a collaboration with the Telangana government to support the digitization of farmland through AI. This will involve the development of new technologies and tools to help farmers better manage their land and crops, as well as to improve the efficiency and sustainability of agriculture in the region.
To support the responsible development of AI in India, Google has also announced a grant of $1 million to the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras. The grant will help to establish India’s first Center for Responsible AI, which will focus on research, education, and outreach in the field.
In recognition of the significant increase in India’s digital adoption, Google has also announced the Google for India Digitization Fund, which will provide support for early-stage and women-led start-ups in the country. This fund will help to drive innovation and entrepreneurship in the digital sector, and will also help to support the development of new technologies and services that are relevant and useful to Indian users.
Google Search will focus more on visuals, videos and regional language content for Indian audiences, the company said at its annual event in New Delhi yesterday. For starters, Google is bringing its multi-search feature in the English language to India, and next year this will be available in Hindi. There are plans to expand multi-search to other Indian languages.
Multi-search is a new feature where users can add a text-based query to a visual image search via Google Lens. For instance, if you search for a cloth pattern on Google using an image, you can add text, saying find me a dress in that particular pattern.
“We see multi-search being used in many ways. We talked about searching for a particular flower with Google Lens. But what if I want to know where to buy one, right? Or how to take care of it? So we are working in the US on the ‘multi-search near me’ feature and will bring it to India as well,” Elizabeth Reid, Vice President- Search, Google said.
Google is also looking at helping those who might not communicate as well as others and suffer from speech impairment. It announced that its Project Relate– which helps people with non-standard speech communicate using voice with the help of AL and machine learning– will be available as a pilot in Hindi in 2023. There’s no confirmation of when this will roll out for all such users, but the pilot will be used to gather feedback on how to improve the technology.
At its launch event, Google showed how it tested this with one user, a woman named Chandani Kumari, who faces such an issue. In the video, Kumari used the Project Relate app to communicate with others, as the app would translate what she said into standard speech that others could understand.
When asked about the future of Search and whether something like a ‘ChatGPT’ is what users could expect, Reid stressed that while AI would make it more natural, Google was also conscious of its responsibility around the issue. “Google has been the pioneer of much of the underlying technology for AI. We want to be bold and innovative. But we also think it’s essential to be responsible,” she said, adding that the latter would be increasingly important as AI advances further.
Google Pay
Google Pay will show more security alerts and warnings now for suspicious transactions. Google Pay also gets transaction search via voice feature. Desirable friction is a feature that will help Google Pay determine if the transaction is genuine or fake. It uses an ML algorithm and flashes a warning in the regional language.
YouTube India updates
YouTube India contributed 10,000 crores to GDP by creating over 7,50,000 full-time jobs. YouTube has a 2 billion user base and just health-related videos have over 30 billion views. Aloud is a new AI, ML product, which can dub the original content at no additional cost. This is being rolled out for select health-based creators and partners. Viewers will be able to toggle these videos in a different audio track.
As a part of YouTube learning, Courses will soon be available on YouTube in India, which will also enable new monetisation options for creators.
This is being rolled out for select health-based creators and partners. Viewers will be able to toggle these videos in a different audio track.
As a part of YouTube learning, Courses will soon be available on YouTube in India, which will also enable new monetisation options for creators.
Google Internet users in rural India
10 years ago, 1 out of 10 internet users in rural India was a woman. Now, 4 out of 10 internet users in rural India are women. Google announced the launch of ‘Project Bindi’ to evaluate and mitigate fairness issues in publicly available natural language processing models. “This project will allow us to advance research and knowledge and build understanding of AI models along three dimensions – societal context like family structure and education, technological gaps like access and social culture and norms,” Sapna Chadha, vice president of marketing at Google, said.
AI powered Google search engine
Liz Reid, VP of search at Google said that Internet users in India have doubled in the last five years. Multisearch feature coming to Indian languages starting with Hindi and it supports searching using images and text. Search will now let you jump to a moment in a YouTube video.
AI for health
Google is currently using AI to help 1 lakh mothers in India. Google is also using AI to decipher handwritten prescriptions, which can be a challenge in India and the company is still fine-tuning this solution.
Apollo working with google on a project to help us ai to check an x-ray for tuberculosis. Google is also building a clinical intelligence engine using AAI that can be used to diagnose common diseases.
AI to help farmers and agriculture
Google is using remote sensing capabilities to give an overview of agriculture capabilities for India. They have also developed a landscape understanding model, developed in Bengaluru. It is being piloted in Telangana. It can identify fields, and natural and man-made water bodies. The model will be able to detect events for the fields as well such as when the crop was sown.
After pharmacists, now Google will be able to understand your doctor’s horrible handwriting
The search engine giant revealed on Monday at its annual conference in India that it was collaborating with pharmacists to develop a feature in Google Lens that could translate sloppy medical notes.
Source: The Indian Express, Hindu, TimesNow
