At the “Google for India” event on Monday, Google India made many announcements about its operations and initiatives in the country.
Here is a list of top tech-related and India-focused initiatives Google India has announced.
Google has launched a new fraud detection model for digital payments on Google Pay.
It created Project Relate – an app trained to unique speech patterns of people with non-standard speech. It is being piloted with English testers in India, and the pilot will be expanded to Hindi users in early 2023.
Google is partnering with the Indian Institute of Science (IISC) on Project Vaani, where they aim to collect speech data across all 773 districts of India.
YouTube has announced Courses, in beta, a new structured learning experience for viewers and a new monetization option for creators that put it in the line of competition with the likes of Byju and Unacademy.
It launched a new speech recognition model that can more effectively understand people who speak in Hinglish.
The company spoke of several new India-first and India-focused innovations for Search focusing on bilingual users’ needs and new search capabilities with camera and voice.
YouTube is also piloting a feature called Aloud for creators to dub multilingual content easily.
Google has announced a 1 million USD grant via Google.org to support the deployment of AI models across crop disease monitoring, predicting yield outcomes, and bringing efficiencies to Kisan call centers with Wadhwani AI.
Google India has invested 1 million USD in grants to the Indian Institute of Technology(IIT), Madras, to establish a center for Responsible AI.
Google has announced Google for India Digitization Fund support for early-stage and women-led start-ups.
Files by Google app in an Android phone uses a custom AI model to scan for and identify documents of importance in a user's phone’s storage and collate it into a convenient and tabularized view. It also categorizes documents of a user's family members.
Google India announced a partnership with the National eGovernance Division (NeGD), where people can access their verified official documents from Digilocker directly in the Files by Google app on Android.
Google has developed a model using remote sensing technology that can generate a holistic understanding of India’s agricultural landscape.
Google is developing AI capabilities to assist medical practitioners and pharmacists with medical document digitization.
The company is piloting a ‘Search in video’ feature where users can search for anything mentioned in a video and quickly find what they’re looking for.
Google India has commenced work towards building a unified model capable of handling over 100 Indian languages across speech and text.
Another India-first innovation is making the search results pages bilingual, for people who prefer it that way. This functionality has already started rolling out in Hindi and will expand to other Indian languages, including Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, and Bengali, in the coming year.
The company is collaborating with Telangana Government to support farmland digitization through AI.
