Chennai, December 19, 2022–In recognition of the step change in India’s digital adoption, Google today announced a series of new concerted initiatives with AI for India, aimed at addressing the language divide on the Internet, supporting digitisation of farmland in partnership with the Telangana Government, and new collaborations and investments to drive responsible development of AI in India. Making a big push for a more inclusive, helpful, and secure Internet for every Indian, Google also announced a number of new innovations across Search, focusing on bilingual users’ needs and new search capabilities using camera and voice; a new fraud detection model for secure digital payments on Google Pay; and integration with Digilocker in the Files by Google app on Android to allow for easy access to key digital documents, privately and safely.
Positioning Indian language support on the Internet as the next big unlock for India’s digital transformation journey, Google announced a collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru (Project Vaani), to capture diverse Indian dialects for building better AI language models. 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.
Delivering his keynote, at its annual flagship Google For India event held in New Delhi, Sanjay Gupta, Country Head and Vice President, of Google India, said, “As partners in India’s digital transformation for nearly two decades, we’re deeply inspired by the myriad ways people have woven technology into every aspect of their everyday lives, placing India’s digital transformation at a tipping point. As access continues to broaden, connectivity must become rewarding for all people everywhere, and enable everyone to seamlessly move up the digital value chain for individual progress. We’re excited to launch concerted efforts with AI to democratize this opportunity and solve for languages, security, and transformation of scaled sectors such as agriculture and healthcare. And under the Google for India Digitization fund, we continue to support the innovation ecosystem with a commitment to support early-stage and women-led start-ups.”
Dr. Manish Gupta, Director – of Research, Google India, “At Google, we firmly believe in the power of AI to make a tangible difference to society and solve some of our biggest challenges. Over the past three years since Google Research was launched in India, we have focussed on building technology solutions that can create meaningful impact for a billion Indians. We look forward to working closely with our ecosystem partners as we continue to responsibly deploy Google’s AI and Machine Learning innovations toward answering big societal needs – from democratizing access to information by enabling more inclusive and powerful Indian language capabilities, to working with the Telangana state government to utilize remote sensing for a deeper understanding of India’s farmlands, to helping digitize medical prescriptions by way of an assistive tool which can be used on a smartphone.”
Liz Reid, Vice President, of Google Search, “Our investments for over a decade have helped us take consistent strides towards building a search experience that’s accessible and useful to everyone in India. Today, India is at the forefront of visual and voice search adoption, consuming content in different languages, and there is still tremendous opportunity to meet people’s information needs. With advances in AI, we’re making Search more helpful than ever by introducing new India-first and India-focused innovations that enable more people to navigate the internet in ways that are most natural and intuitive to them.”
Royal Hansen, Vice President, Privacy, Safety, and Security, Google, “Our highest priority is to safeguard people on the internet every day, and AI is foundational to this effort. As the number of digital users and businesses grow in India, so do the attack surfaces. Analyzing and improving cybersecurity across surfaces is no longer a human-scale problem, it needs to be supplemented with sophisticated technology. AI can help respond to these unprecedented challenges efficiently, effectively, and at scale. We are committed to deepening the role of AI in helping respond to complex and shape-shifting cybersecurity challenges and enabling a safe and secure experience on the internet for all Indians.”
Shri Abhishek Singh, President & CEO, NeGD and MyGov, MD & CEO, Digital India Corporation, “With easy access to authentic digital documents, DigiLocker facilitates the speedy delivery of government benefits across financial inclusion, education, health initiatives, and more. The government recognizes the role of key partnerships, and Google is an important and responsible tech player in the country that continues to offer helpful products and services to millions of Indians. We expect that DigiLocker’s integration and partnership on Android will drive smoother and ubiquitous access to digitized documents in a safe and secure manner for all our users.”
Rama Devi, Director of Emerging Technology, Telangana State, “AI can be a powerful tool for Governments to drive transformational impact across sectors. We want to leverage AI to boost the economic contribution of agriculture while impacting lives at scale. Our collaboration with Google will play a critical role in us enabling agriculture solutions at a field level and sharing that data with the wider ecosystem so that participants across the value chain benefit.”
Prof. Ravindran, Head – of Robert Bosch Center for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBC-DSAI), IIT Madras, “With the rise in the development and deployment of AI systems, it is essential to establish responsible guidelines to ensure fair, ethical, and safe usage of AI-based solutions. There is a need to develop technology that is understandable to the end users, provides strong safety and performance guarantees, and raises awareness of the impact of the technology on society. The Center for Responsible AI is a first-of-its-kind initiative in India that aims to bring together technologists, sociologists, policy and legal experts from academia, industry, and the government to study all aspects of this domain called Responsible AI. We thank Google for partnering with us on this initiative and for being the first collaborator of the center.”
Details about the announcements
Using AI to make the web even more accessible to Indians in their native language
Google’s joint initiative with the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, will facilitate a vastly better understanding of India’s speech landscape. The data has been open-sourced to help more startups, developers, and students build language solutions for India and use this richly diverse speech data to create technology that reflects the way every Indian speaks their local language.
Google has also set a goal to build a single, unified model, capable of handling over 100 Indian languages across both speech and text, paving the way for a more inclusive experience for many more Indian language speakers.
Building foundational innovations toward the vision of Digital Agriculture in India
Today Google announced its efforts to harness advanced AI and Machine Learning capabilities along with remote sensing technology, to develop a model that can help generate a holistic understanding of India’s agricultural landscape. This project will also enable the AgriStack and other solutions for India’s agricultural ecosystem, with a focus on identifying farm-level landscape and farm boundaries, and potentially identify crops grown in each field. This information will support building a publicly-accessible dataset for enabling digital public goods and services while spurring innovation across the agriculture value chain.
In partnership with the state of Telangana, this model will help facilitate agricultural solutions at a field level, and benefit the broader agricultural chain.
We also announced a new US$1 million grant via Google.Org to Wadhwani AI towards using advanced technology for better agricultural outcomes, supporting their work on crop disease monitoring and yield outcomes, while helping bring efficiencies to multiple Kisan Call Centers that enable farmers access crucial information on weather, crops, and more.
Using AI toward bettering healthcare
Google announced a state-of-the-art AI and machine learning model that can identify and highlight medicines within handwritten prescriptions. This will act as an assistive technology for digitizing handwritten medical documents by augmenting the humans in the loop such as pharmacists, however no decision will be made solely based on the output provided by this technology.
Extending its commitment towards Responsible AI, Google announced an investment of US$1 million in grants to the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, to establish the first of-its-kind multidisciplinary center for Responsible AI. This center will foster collective effort — involving researchers, domain experts, developers, community members, policymakers, and more – in getting AI right, and localizing it to the Indian context.
Making it easier for people to search and explore information visually
Google is making visual search even more natural with the introduction of Multisearch, a major milestone in how people can search for information using images and text simultaneously. Multisearch is available in English in India and will be coming to many Indian languages in the next year, starting with Hindi.
Building a more intuitive search experience in Indian languages
In an India-first innovation – to make it easier for people who use more than one language to seek and explore information – Google is making search results pages bilingual, for people who prefer it that way. Using advanced Machine Learning-based translation models and cross-language search technology, Google can now serve high-quality and relevant content in a local language alongside English results.
This functionality has already started rolling out in Hindi and will be expanding to other Indian languages, including Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, and Bengali, in the coming year.
Improving speech recognition technology for Hinglish speakers
Google is also addressing India’s dynamic language needs when it comes to voice. The Company has launched a new speech recognition model that can more effectively understand people who speak in Hinglish. This uses a new, neural-network-inspired speech recognition model that takes into account the individual’s accents, surrounding sounds, context, and speaking style.
Piloting a new way to help serve people with non-standard speech
Google has been piloting 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 this pilot to Hindi users in early 2023. Through this project, Google’s endeavor is to make products that rely on speech recognition technology, like Google Assistant, more accessible to everyone.
Easy and organized access to verified official documents from Digilocker on Android phones
Google announced a collaboration with the National eGovernance Division (NeGD) to enable people with easy access to their authentic digital documents, directly from the Files by Google app on Android. This functionality is built on a solid foundation of privacy and security. The documents stored in Files by Google will be in an isolated environment on the device, and can only be accessed using a unique lock screen authentication.
Using deep learning to improve fraud detection in Google Pay
Google Pay announced enhanced security features for users paying digitally, including multi-layered intelligent warnings to alert users if the fraud detection system detects suspicious activity.