The 8th edition of Google for India took place on Monday at Pragati Maidan in Delhi. At the event, Google made several announcements like DigiLocker through its Files app and the new 'Transaction Search' feature of Google Pay. The company's CEO Sundar Pichai came to India to attend the event.
Sundar Pichai said, we built Google Pay in India based on the UPI stack and now we are bringing it to other countries around the world. He also said that we are working on a powerful AI model that can fetch information in thousands of languages.
At the same time, Communications Minister Ashwini Vaishnav said, there are many areas in which AI is going to bring significant changes. Agriculture is one such sector, bridging the language gap and third is making credit facilities easier for the people at the bottom of the development cycle.
7 major announcements by Google during the event:
1. Digi Locker will now be made available on Google Files:
Google announced a new feature for Android phone users at the event. Under this, users will also be able to use DigiLocker through the Google Files app. DigiLocker is a virtual locker. In this, all the important documents can be stored digitally in a paperless format. All the documents saved in DigiLocker are completely valid.
2. New Transaction Feature on Google Pay:
Google Pay has launched a new 'Transaction Search' feature. With the help of this feature, the user will be able to know about his transaction through voice. Google Pay will now show more security alerts and warnings for suspicious transactions. It uses ML algorithms. This warning will also be in the regional language.
3. Search Facility inside Video:
Google is testing the search facility inside any video. You just need to type your query through the 'Search in video feature' and you will be able to go to the exact place in the video that you are looking for. Earlier there was only Seek option to search for anything in the video. 'Search in video feature' will make the search easy.
4. YouTube’s new facility ‘Courses’:
YouTube will start a facility called 'Courses' in 2023, which will make learning more interactive. Creators will be able to offer free and paid courses to provide a structured learning experience to viewers. Viewers who choose to purchase the courses will be able to watch the videos ad-free.
5. Creators can now dub the content for free:
Aloud is a new AI, ML product that can dub original content at no additional cost. It is being rolled out to select health-based creators and partners. Viewers will be able to toggle these videos to a different audio track.
6. India’s first Innovation and feature:
After Hindi, now search result pages feature India will also become bilingual. This feature will also support Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, and Bengali languages in the coming days. The voice search feature will now be able to better understand people who speak Hinglish. A new neural network model will be used, which will take into account the person's accent, context, and more.
7. Google will be able to read doctor’s handwriting:
Google has announced a new technology to decode the handwriting of doctors. This technology will scan the handwriting and tell the user what the doctor has written in his prescription. To use this feature, the user has to take a picture of the doctor's slip or upload the picture of the slip from their gallery to Google Lens.
Other major points associated with Google’s event:
• YouTube India contributed 10,000 crores to GDP by creating more than 7,50,000 full-time jobs. YouTube has 2 billion users and health-related videos alone have been viewed over 30 billion times.
• Google's India head Sanjay Gupta said AI can help in translation on a large scale. It can help in agriculture and help in predicting floods. For India, AI can help in a big way in energy and food security.
• Google plans to build an AI/ML model in partnership with the Indian Institute of Science. Language samples are being collected from 773 districts of India through Project Vani. Project Vani will ensure that the data collected and generated under it will be open-source.
• Google is using remote sensing capabilities for agriculture in India. They have also developed a landscape understanding model, developed in Bengaluru. It is being tested in Telangana. It can identify fields and natural and man-made water bodies.
• Google is currently using AI to assist 1 lakh mothers in India. Google is also using AI to understand hand-written prescriptions, which can be a challenge in India. The company is still working on this solution.
• Apollo is working on a project with Google to help test X-rays for tuberculosis. Google is also building a clinical intelligence engine using AAI that can be used to diagnose common ailments.
• 10 years ago, 1 in 10 Internet users in rural India was a woman. Now, 4 out of 10 Internet users in rural India are women. Google also announced Project Bindi, which helps understand social context and technological gaps.
• Google has announced a grant of $1 million to IIT Madras for India's first Center for Responsible AI.