Recently, I had the opportunity to write in my mother tongue Malayalam after close to two decades. Using a keyboard to write in Malayalam has always been a nightmare for me and I have tried everything from the physical to the virtual before abandoning hope. But this time I used Google input tools, typing in English as each word got transliterated into Malayalam. I discovered that the process was fast and easy. I am sure millions of Indians are realising the same.
We are finally entering an era of a truly Indian internet. While Google’s increased focus on Indian languages is driving this, there are a bunch of other stakeholders who are making both consumption and creation of content easy. The internet in India has clearly broken the web of English and is going to explode, bringing down the barriers to access for millions of people. Google estimates that while 150 million of the 350 million internet users now are using local languages, this number is expected to become a majority when the number of Indians online goes up to 650 million in 2020.
Shashidhar Thakur, VP Engineering at Google Search, says their investments in voice search, Indic keyboards and auto-complete have started helping Indians find what they want in the comfort of their native language. The search giant has witnessed a 10x growth in local language queries over the past 1.5 years since when it made it easier to search in local languages. The Indic keyboard is now available in 11 Indian languages. For those who can’t type even in local languages, there is voice search. It has never been easier for a local language user to exploit the true potential of the internet.
Thakur says the amount of leapfrogging done in search over the past few years has been possible because of advancements in artificial intelligence. “Similarly, machine translations from one language to another would not have been possible without machine learning,” Thakur explains.
While Google is doing its bit with the web, Indus OS is helping smartphones go local with what it calls the first regional operating system. Its Android-based OS, developed by a bunch of IITians and available through India’s top smartphone brands, helps users operate their smartphone in 12 Indian languages. And the OS offers much more than a keyboard, even translating incoming messages to the language of the user’s choice. Indus is also making it easier for app makers and services to integrate regional languages much more naturally, thus making their products far more relevant.
Meanwhile, Google is also doing its bit to bring down the other barrier, that of connectivity, by ensuring that the cost of search also goes down for the Indian user. Thakur says search pages and even publisher pages are lighter now, loading faster and consuming lesser data. Google has been pushing AMP or accelerated mobile pages that load 4x faster, in less than a second, and consumes 10x less data as its research shows 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load.
Another big piece of the puzzle is content. Local language internet is still very small—less than 0.1% of sites are in local languages. So, Google is using its Newslab to help local language publishers understand the medium better and create more engaging stories for internet user. The very fact that Google search now works for local content has prompted publishers to turn their focus towards regional language sites, so far limited to traffic from social media and direct readers. As more and more people search and find content in their language, more and more content will be created to inform these new readers. That should be able to fix the gap between regional and English content in the near future.
nandagopal.rajan@expressindia.com