A new slate of India-focussed initiatives in the AI space have been announced by Google at its annual Google for India event today. From bridging the country’s digital divide to supporting innovative use of AI to help farmers, these moves are part of Google’s push for “for a more inclusive, helpful and secure Internet for every Indian”.
The three major areas they are focusing their interventions on are languages, agriculture and education. Delivering his keynote, Sanjay Gupta, Country Head and Vice President, Google India, said, “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.”
Language as barrier
As more and more Indian users come online, language becomes a key factor in accessibility. Google announced a collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru on an initiative called Project Vaani. The goal is 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. At the event, Professor Govindan Rangarajan, director of the Indian Institute of Science noted that they have already collected data from 70 districts across the country in over 30 languages.
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. Part of this attempt to increase accessibility of the internet includes making it easier for people to search for information visually. For this, Google introduced Multisearch, wherein people can search for text and images at the same time. For instance, one can take a photo of a fabric and search for shirts or curtains in that fabric. This feature is available in English right now, and will be rolled out in many Indian languages, starting with Hindi.
India is at the forefront of voice search, with 2x Indians availing of the feature compared to the global average. Google also announced the launch of 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.
Accessibility amongst users with non-standard speech was also a focus. 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.
AI for agriculture
In the agritech space, Google announced efforts to use AI, Machine Learning and remote sensing technology to create a holistic understanding of India’s agricultural landscape. Satellite imagery is used to identify 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. They are piloting this in partnership with the state of Telangana.
Healthcare
Who among us hasn’t struggled to read a doctor’s prescription? To tackle this, the company announced a AI and machine learning model that can identify and highlight medicines within handwritten prescriptions using Google Lens. They also announced that they are building a Clinical Intelligence Engine with Apollo, in order to support diagnosis of diseases and allow doctors to better analyse medical data.
Gender balance
Google also announced the Google for India Digitization Fund, a $300 million fund to support early-stage startups. Part of this fund will be allocated for women-led startups and those focussing on bridging the digital divide, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at the event.
The three major areas they are focusing their interventions on are languages, agriculture and education. Delivering his keynote, Sanjay Gupta, Country Head and Vice President, Google India, said, “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.”
Language as barrier
As more and more Indian users come online, language becomes a key factor in accessibility. Google announced a collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru on an initiative called Project Vaani. The goal is 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. At the event, Professor Govindan Rangarajan, director of the Indian Institute of Science noted that they have already collected data from 70 districts across the country in over 30 languages.
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. Part of this attempt to increase accessibility of the internet includes making it easier for people to search for information visually. For this, Google introduced Multisearch, wherein people can search for text and images at the same time. For instance, one can take a photo of a fabric and search for shirts or curtains in that fabric. This feature is available in English right now, and will be rolled out in many Indian languages, starting with Hindi.
India is at the forefront of voice search, with 2x Indians availing of the feature compared to the global average. Google also announced the launch of 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.
Accessibility amongst users with non-standard speech was also a focus. 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.
AI for agriculture
In the agritech space, Google announced efforts to use AI, Machine Learning and remote sensing technology to create a holistic understanding of India’s agricultural landscape. Satellite imagery is used to identify 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. They are piloting this in partnership with the state of Telangana.
Healthcare
Who among us hasn’t struggled to read a doctor’s prescription? To tackle this, the company announced a AI and machine learning model that can identify and highlight medicines within handwritten prescriptions using Google Lens. They also announced that they are building a Clinical Intelligence Engine with Apollo, in order to support diagnosis of diseases and allow doctors to better analyse medical data.
Gender balance
Google also announced the Google for India Digitization Fund, a $300 million fund to support early-stage startups. Part of this fund will be allocated for women-led startups and those focussing on bridging the digital divide, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at the event.
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