The Google for India 2022 event that concluded on December 19 stressed heavily on the implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in real life scenarios. For a country as diverse as India, AI can solve multiple challenges, said Google.
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Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet, in his conversation with Ashwini Vaishnaw, Minister for Communications and Electronics & IT, mentioned that Google’s India Digitisation Fund (IDF) will focus more on women-driven businesses and start-ups. Google IDF was announced in 2020 with a grant of $10 billion.
Regarding the tech regulation that is going to be a part of the Data Protection Bill, Pichai said that responsible regulation is welcomed. He also told audiences in New Delhi that Google Pay might go global.
Under the project Vani, Google is building a single, unified AI model that will be capable of handling over 100 Indian languages across speech and text. This is going to be part of its global effort to bring the world’s 1,000 most-spoken languages online, to help people access knowledge and information in their preferred language.
The U.S headquartered company is supporting a new, multi-disciplinary centre for responsible AI with IIT Madras. A grant of $1 million has been sanctioned for this centre, said Google.
Google is also working to assist farmers in India with real-time AI-based monitoring solutions, using its landscape understanding model.
“AI can solve energy and food security issues,” said Sanjay Gupta, Google’s Country Head and Vice President, India.
Google for India 2022 round up: Sundar Pichai on data protection, AI, projects, and more | Photo Credit: Haider Ali Khan
The search engine giant is simultaneously working to close the gender divide in society under the project Bindi. As per Google, now 4 out of 10 internet users in rural India are women.
Google disclosed that Indians use Lens the most in the world and are actively searching the internet with voice commands. The growth in voice searches here has doubled, when compared to global users.
Google is also working on project Relate for non-standard speech. It will help people with such voice patterns in three steps: Listen, Repeat and Assistance. It will be available in Hindi in 2023 as well. Similarly, it is working on an end-to-end speech recognition feature.
Google is working with the National e-Governance Division and MeitY to bring DigiLocker-verified documents directly onto the Files by Google App for Android users.
