
Google’s annual Google for India event saw company executives announcing various new products, projects and developments. CEO Sundar Pichai was also on stage in conversation with the Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Minister for Railways, Meity and Communications. The 8th edition of Google for India 2022 was live-streamed on YouTube. The company announced new AI-based solutions and some new partnerships with Indian brands to drive India’s digital economy.
Sanjay Gupta, head of Google India, kicked off the event, speaking about Google’s India Digitization Fund 2020 and the company’s plan to invest in women-led ventures. Manish Gupta, Director of Google Research India, spoke about the company’s efforts to develop AI solutions for the country.
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.
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“It is easy to build something which scales across the entire country and this is the opportunity that India has. There’s no better moment to do a startup, even though we are working through a macro-economic situation right now."
Ashwini Vaishnaw, Minister of Railways, Communications and Electronics & Information Technology, Government of India and Google CEO Sundar Pichai are on the stage.
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.
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 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.
Project Relate is an app that can understand people with non-binary speech. It can listen, repeat, and understand, and the app is available for Hindi users in early 2023.
Search result pages will be bilingual in India for those who want and the feature is already available in Hindi. This feature will be supported in languages Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, and Bengali in the coming days. Voice search can now understand people who speak Hinglish better. Using a new neural network model, which takes the person’s accent, context, etc into account.
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.
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 also announces Project Bindi, which helps understand the societal context and technological gaps.
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.
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.
Google plans to build an AI/ML model in partnership with the Indian Institute of Science. The project called Project Vaani was to collect language samples from 773 districts in India. Project Vaani will ensure the data that is collected and produced under it will be open-source.
Manish Gupta, Director of Google Research India, speaks at the Google for India conference.
Google has invested in women-led companies. The company is also partnering with Airtel and Jio to make the internet more accessible.
AI can help with translation at scale. It can bring leaps in online safety. It can help with agriculture and help with flood forecasting. For India, AI can help in a big way with energy and food security, said Sanjay Gupta.
Google's 8th edition of its India-specific keynote has begun and the company is showcasing a video on how Google is being used for various purposes in India. According to the company, Google is built to help. Sanjay Gupta, the country head is currently on the stage.
India's tech industry is valued at 230 billion dollars and India has over 700 million internet users.
Google for India is a big event for us. Thrilled to welcome all of you face-to-face. Tech is woven into our cultural fabric. India is one of the largest developers of mobile apps globally. Sanjay Gupta, head of Google India on stage and said that the Indian tech industry will be worth a trillion dollars in the coming years. Indian internet story has come of age.
In the 7th edition of Google for India, the company announced a more local Google search engine, which allowed users to access Google in native Indian languages. Similarly, Google Pay also got a new India-centric feature, which allowed small business owners to showcase their inventory on the Google Pay app.
The event is taking place in Delhi and will be live-streamed on YouTube. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google will be delivering a special keynote on various Google products and services that are tailor-made for India.