At Google For India—the flagship event by the tech giant—a slew of new projects and pilots were announced along with improvements to its vast array of services, including the Android operating system, payments, search and video streaming.
At the event in New Delhi, Google LLC and Alphabet Inc.'s Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai spoke at a fireside chat with India's IT and Telecom Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw about the future of artificial intelligence in furthering India's tech stack.
Some of the key announcements were on projects to capture Indian dialects for building AI language models, a grant to enable use of advanced technology for better agricultural outcomes, an AI and machine learning model to identify medicines within handwritten prescriptions, and a grant to establish a responsible AI centre, among other initiatives.
Here's A Summary Of The Major Announcements:
Project Vaani: Google announced a joint initiative 'Project Vaani' with the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. This collaboration is aimed at collecting and transcribing open source speech data from across all of India's 773 districts, making it available through the Government of India's Bhashini project in the future. The aim is to capture as many Indian dialects for building better AI language models.
Digitisation Of Farmland: In partnership with the Telangana government, Google will help build an AI-enabled model with remote sensing technology focused on identifying farm-level landscape and farm boundaries, and potentially identify crops grown in each field. This will also enable the AgriStack and other solutions for India's agricultural ecosystem.
$1 Million Grant To Wadhwani AI: The grant via Google.org will be utilised towards using advanced technology for better agricultural outcomes and bringing efficiencies to multiple Kisan Call Centers.
Solving The Problem Of Illegible Doctor Prescriptions: Google announced an AI and machine learning model that can identify and highlight medicines within handwritten prescriptions.
$1 Million Grant To IIT Madras: The grant will help establish India's first Center for Responsible AI. This center will involve researchers, domain experts, developers, community members, policymakers and others—in getting AI right, and localising it to the Indian context.
Multisearch: Google will allow people to search for information using images and text simultaneously. Multisearch is available in English in India, and will also be available in several Indian languages over the next year, starting with Hindi.
Bilingual Results: Google will now serve relevant content in a local language alongside English results. This functionality has already started rolling out in Hindi, and will be expanded to other Indian languages including Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and Bengali in the coming year.
Speech Recognition: It has launched a new speech recognition model that can effectively understand people who speak in Hinglish. This uses a new, neural network-inspired speech recognition model that takes into account the individual's accent, surrounding sounds, context, and speaking style. It has also piloted '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 the pilot to Hindi users in early 2023.
Digilocker Access: Google announced a collaboration with the National eGovernance Division to enable people to gain easy access to their authentic digital documents directly from the Files by Google app on Android.
Funding For Startups: Google will select early-stage and women-led startups via its India Digitization Fund, which was announced in 2020, with a kitty of Rs 75,000 crore. It bought 7.7% stake in Jio Platforms Ltd. for Rs 37,000 crore and a 1.2% stake in Bharti Airtel Ltd. for Rs 6,000 crore approximately.
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