Google for India 2024: Google announces key updates for Gemini Live, AI Overviews, Maps and Google Pay

Google announced Gemini Live in Hindi, expansion of  AI Overviews in Indian languages, gold loans for Google Pay users and more at its Google for India event

Updated - October 04, 2024 01:13 pm IST

Google announced updates for its key products at its  Google for India event in New Delhi.

Google announced updates for its key products at its  Google for India event in New Delhi. | Photo Credit: Haider Ali Khan

Google on Thursday (October 3, 2024) announced key product updates during the tenth edition of Google for India event in New Delhi, highlighting the company’s commitment and plans for the country.

Google announced Gemini Live in Hindi which is currently available in English with eight more Indian languages including Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Urdu in the coming weeks. A blog making the announcement said that over 40% of Indian users rely on voice interaction to use Gemini.

The U.S. based company will also be expanding the AI Overviews to include Tamil, Telugu, Bengali and Marathi eventually while Hindi has been made available currently.

The tech giant wants to assure India has data sovereignty by giving all organisations here including the public sector companies the option to store their data and conduct machine learning processing for the Gemini 1.5 Flash fully locally.

Besides this, Google will also be launching an open-source AI Agent Framework in the country powered by Gemini with the goal to empower businesses here by giving access to services and information across sector with the focus initially on agriculture and skilling.

Users will also be able to use Google Lens to search via videos and ask deeper questions about moving objects. For example, if you’re cooking something and need help with the recipe, the user can open Lens and record a video while asking Gemini how they can fix the meal. Gemini then returns with AI Overview with links that are relevant.

For the Google Maps users, there will be two new real-time weather alerts in India.

Google said to remove 170 million fake reviews on Maps, globally.

Indian developers earn over ₹4,000 crore annually through Google Play, it said.

For businesses and SMBs in the country, Google announced the new AI-digitised menu option in Search. The businesses will now list WhatsApp and text message as chat options in Search.

For Google Pay, the company said that they have disbursed 80% loans in tier 2 towns. It said that more than 5 crore Indians have checked their CIBIL score on Google Pay.

Google Pay will now be able to share Personal loans partnering with Aditya Birla Finance.

Google Pay users can now take Gold loans as the company has announced a collaboration with Muthoot Finance.

Google Pay also said that they have saved ₹13,000 crore from financial scams since last year.

Google Pay said that it has issued 41 million warnings for fraudulent transactions in India.

Google announced the opening of a Safety Engineering Centre in India.

Google announced the ‘DPI in a Box’ with Ekstep Foundation. It will be a plug-and-play model for nations to build their digital infrastructure.

Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org, announced a $4 million grant to Central Square Foundation to help uplift the AI literacy baseline for more than 5 million students, educators and parents across the country.

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