Google Announces Several AI-Based Initiatives to Meet India's Digital Needs

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.

Google announced a collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru (Project Vaani), to capture diverse Indian dialects for building better AI language models, positioning Indian language support on the Internet as the next big unlock for India's digital transformation journey. It stated that the collaboration aims to collect and transcrib open-source speech data from all 773 districts of India and make it available through the government of India's Bhashini project.

"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," said Po Sanjay Gupta, Country Head and Vice President, Google India, in his keynote address at the annual flagship Google For India event held here in the national capital.

"As access continues to broaden, connectivity must become rewarding for everyone everywhere and enable everyone to seamlessly move up the digital value chain for individual progress. The answer is yes. 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 toward answering big societal needs - from democratizing access to information by enabling more inclusive and powerful Indian language capabilities to collaborate with the Telangana state government to use remote sensing for a deeper understanding of India's farmlands, to assisting in the digitization of medical prescriptions through an as-yet-unannounced initiative."

At the event, Liz Reid, Vice President of Google Search, said that the investments for over a decade have helped it take consistent strides toward 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 multiple 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.