Google’s flagship event, Google for India has announced its efforts with AI for the changing digital needs of the country. According to the company, it announced a series of new concerted initiatives with AI 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 in India.
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, Sanjay Gupta, country head and vice president, Google India, said. “We’re launching concerted efforts with AI to democratise this opportunity and solve for languages, security, and transformation of scaled sectors such as agriculture and healthcare. And under the Google for India Digitisation fund, we continue to support the innovation ecosystem with a commitment to support early-stage and women-led start-ups,” he added.
Additionally, in line with its efforts, Google announced a number of new innovations across Search, focusing on bilingual users’ needs and new search capabilities using camera and voice. Moreover, it announced a new fraud detection model for secure digital payments on Google Pay and integration with Digilocker in Files by Google app on Android to allow easy access to digital documents, privately and safely, it claimed.
During the event, google made the following announcements.
Using AI to make the web more accessible to Indians in their native language
Google’s joint initiative with the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, will facilitate a better understanding of India’s speech landscape. The data has been open-sourced to help more startups, developers, and students to build language solutions for India and use this speech data to create technology that reflects the way every Indian speaks their local language.
Additionally, Google claimed that it has set a goal to build a single, unified model, capable of handling over 100 Indian languages across both speech and text, for an inclusive experience for many more Indian language speakers.
Building foundational innovations toward the vision of digital agriculture in India
At the event, Google announced its efforts to harness advanced AI and machine learning capabilities along with remote sensing technology to develop a model that can help generate a holistic understanding of India’s agricultural landscape. According to the company, this project will also enable AgriStack and other solutions for India’s agricultural ecosystem, with a focus on identifying farm-level landscape and farm boundaries, and potentially identifying crops grown in each field. This information will support building a publicly-accessible dataset for enabling digital public goods and services while spurring innovation across the agriculture value chain.
In partnership with the state of Telangana, this model will help facilitate agricultural solutions at a field level, and benefit the broader agricultural chain, it claimed.
Using AI for improving healthcare
Google announced its AI and machine learning model that can identify and highlight medicines within handwritten prescriptions. As per the company, this will act as an assistive technology for digitising handwritten medical documents by augmenting the humans in the loop such as pharmacists. However, no decision will be made solely based on the output provided by this technology, it asserted.
Making it easier for people to search and explore information visually
Google is making visual search more natural with the introduction of Multisearch, where people can search for information using images and text simultaneously. Multisearch is available in English in India, and will be coming in other Indian languages by next year, starting with Hindi.
Building an intuitive search experience in Indian languages
In an India-first innovation, Google claimed to make search results pages bilingual for people who prefer it that way. Using machine learning-based translation models and cross-language search technology, Google can now serve high-quality and relevant content in a local language alongside English results, it claimed. This functionality has started in Hindi and will be expanding to other Indian languages, including Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, and Bengali, in the coming year.
Improving speech recognition technology for Hinglish speakers
Google asserted to address India’s dynamic language needs when it comes to voice. The company has launched a new speech recognition model that can more effectively understand people who speak in Hinglish.
Piloting a new way to help serve people with non-standard speech
Google has been piloting Project Relate – an app that is trained to unique speech patterns of people with non-standard speech. The company has been piloting the app with English users in India, and will be expanding this pilot to Hindi users in early 2023, it claimed. Through this project, Google’s endeavour is to make products that rely on speech recognition technology, like Google Assistant, more accessible to everyone.
Easy and organised access to verified official documents from Digilocker on Android phones
Google spoke of its collaboration with the National eGovernance Division (NeGD) to enable people with easy access to their authentic digital documents, directly from the Files by Google app on Android. The documents stored in Files by Google will be in an isolated environment on the device, and can only be accessed using a unique Lock Screen authentication.
Using deep learning to improve fraud detection in Google Pay
Moreover, Google Pay announced enhanced security features for users paying digitally, including multi-layered intelligent warnings to alert users if the fraud detection system detects suspicious activity.