Google for India event introduces new India-first features: Find out about them here | Digit

Google unveiled its plans to roll out new India-first features during the Google for India event. The event was attended by CEO Sundar Pichai and Ashwini Vaishnaw, Minister of Railways, Communications, and Electronics & Information Technology for the gove

During the annual Google for India event, the company announced new features to help make the internet more accessible for Indians. The tech giant spoke about its use of AI, better safety features in Google Pay, and the ability to integrate the Files app with the Digilocker service created by the government. 

“I think artificial intelligence will touch every sector over time. I’m most excited at how we can use AI in the service of our mission at Google. We are increasingly using AI to scale up the number of languages we can offer. We are now working on one powerful AI model to support 1000 languages. AI will help us in being able to bring a multi-modal view to Google Search,” said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google.

Top Google For India announcements

Project Vaani

Google is partnering with the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru for Project Vaani. This project aims “to capture diverse Indian dialects for building better AI language models.” The project will involve open-source speech data being collected and transcribed from all 773 districts in India. This will be possible through the Bhashini project (led by the Government of India). Google aims to develop a “single, unified model, capable of handling over 100 Indian languages across both speech and text.”

New Search Features

Google also unveiled new search features at the event. Google’s Multisearch feature will soon be available in many Indian languages, starting with Hindi. This feature allows users to search with images and text simultaneously. At this moment, it is only available in English. Google will also launch an India-first feature wherein search results pages will be bilingual (these results will be shown only to users who prefer bilingual results).

Google will use its “advanced Machine Learning-based translation models” and “a cross-language search technology,” for this. This feature has started rolling out in Hindi and will be available in other Indian languages, such as Tamil, Marathi, Telugu, and Bengali in the coming year.

Better speech recognition

Google announced that it will be improving its speech recognition technology for Hinglish speakers. The company says that the new model will “more effectively understand people who speak in Hinglish,”. This will be doable as it uses a new “neural-network inspired speech recognition model that takes into account the individual’s accents, surrounding sounds, context, and speaking style.”

Files and Digilocker integration

Google is collaborating with the National eGovernance Division (NeGD) to help people access their verified digital documents via the ‘Files by Google’ app on Android. This will be achieved by integrating the same with Digilocker. The tech giant says 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.” The app can also identify important government documents and put them in one secured folder. This holds true for the PAN card, Aadhaar card as well important documents stored on the Files app. 

Security enhancements for Google Pay

Finally, Google announced better security features for Google Pay. These features will include multi-layered intelligent warnings to alert users of any suspicious activity. 

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