During the 8th Google for India event held on December 19, Google showcased a series of new features and is looking to leverage its AI capabilities to help ensure democratized and secure internet access to all Indians, regardless of the languages they use.
Financial Express, Indian Express, and other media reported that Google held the 8th annual event Google for India in New Delhi on December 19, with participants including Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Ashwini Vaishnaw, minister of Electronics & IT of India.
Sanjay Gupta, country head and vice president of Google India, said during his keynote speech that Google is excited to launch a concerted effort with AI to democratize this opportunity and solve for languages, security, and transformation of scaled sectors, such as agriculture and healthcare.
Meanwhile, Pichai said in a discussion with India's PM Narendra Modi that Google is increasingly using AI to scale up the number of languages and recently added nine new Indian languages like Assamese, Bhojpuri, Konkani, etc.
Google introduced a multimodal AI model that supports more than 100 Indian languages. Google partnered with the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru to colllect and transcribe open-source speech data from across India's 773 district, and will open the data to help startups, developers, and students to build language solutions for India.
Google enhanced its Search by launching Multisearch, which is initially available in English and Hindi and helps people search for information using images and text simultaneously. Google also uses an advanced machine learning model to provide bilingual search result pages that currently support Hindi and will expand to Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, and Bengali in the coming year. Meanwhile, Google launched a new speech recognition model that can understand people who speak in Hinglish.
Regarding security features, Google adds new security features to Google Pay, including a multi-layered intelligent warning for fraud detection. Google also partnered with National eGovernance Division to enable people to access their verified digital documents by integrating Digilocker with the Files by Google app.
