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Editor\u2019s note: Below is an edited version of a blog from Sanjay Gupta, Google\u2019s Country Head and Vice President, India, summarizing the key announcements from Google for India.<\/i><\/p>\n
India\u2019s digital transformation is at a tipping point. Seven hundred million connected Indians, affordable smartphones and data, record highs in digital payments, the digitization of citizen services, and a vibrant start-up ecosystem have put the technology sector on track to become the single largest contributor to the national economy.<\/p>\n
We feel privileged to have played a part in this extraordinary story. Our mission in India is to make the internet helpful and safer for a billion Indians. We\u2019ve introduced India-first innovations, worked to lower barriers to access, and invested in strengthening the strategic pillars of India\u2019s digital economy through our $10 billion India Digitization Fund.<\/p>\n
Today, at our 8th Google for India, joined by Sundar Pichai, our CEO, and senior Google leaders and product experts, we stepped up our commitment to build a more inclusive, helpful, and safer internet for every Indian \u2014 and shared how we hope to supercharge India\u2019s digital transformation by harnessing AI.<\/p>\n
Partnerships are the cornerstone of our journey in India, and essential for such a scaled transition. Today, with partners from across the public and private sectors, we announced new efforts focused on taking Indians from foundational access to the point where technology becomes the enabler for growth, knowledge, health and progress.<\/p>\n
Early stage startups are the engine that drives innovation, with many building products that address key information and service needs for people across India, especially for novice internet users. Strengthening our ongoing resolve to support India\u2019s digital innovators, as part of our India Digitization Fund investments, we will be targeting support for early stage companies with a particular focus on women-led startups. For an update on the India Digitization Fund\u2019s progress on building with and for India, watch this video.<\/p>\n
Building on our vision of an internet experience that is responsive to every Indian\u2019s choice of language, be it via text or voice, we announced a set of AI-based product integrations that will serve Indic language internet users better through a new, evolved, multimodal, bilingual model covering over 100 Indian languages. We also introduced another India-first innovation \u2014 making Search results pages bilingual by tapping into our advanced ML-based translation models and a cross-language search technology.<\/p>\n
Looking to the longer term, we\u2019ve joined hands with the Indian Institute of Science on \u2018Project Vaani\u2019 \u2014 an initiative that aims at collecting and transcribing open source speech data from across all of India\u2019s 773 districts, making it available through the Government of India\u2019s Bhashini project.<\/p>\n
Professor Govindan Rangarajan, Director, Indian Institute of Science<\/i><\/b>, \u201cIndia’s language landscape is unique, with dialects and accents often changing every few hundred kilometers, and multiple languages spoken in the same district. And so we are pleased to collaborate with Google on project Vaani, an effort that is fundamental to creating inclusive AI technology that truly reflects India’s rich spread of languages and speech. Our team at IISc is already working to gather speech data, and we aim to cover all 773 districts across the country. This information is being open sourced via Bhashini, India\u2019s national language mission, and we are excited at the possibilities and solutions that Vaani will enable.”<\/i><\/p>\n
For more details on how we\u2019re enriching our Search experience with more visual, voice and Indian language offerings, visit here.<\/p>\n
As well as harnessing AI to increase access to information and knowledge, we\u2019re also supporting partners working to accelerate AI\u2019s impact on industry sectors like agriculture \u2014 and share the benefits of technology with communities across the country.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re collaborating with the Government of Telangana as it pilots AI-based solutions for agricultural innovation for the state\u2019s approximately 6 million farmers. And we\u2019re partnering with Cropin, a global ag-ecosystem intelligence provider, to improve applications that can track land use and bring digital services to farmers nationwide.<\/p>\n
Rama Devi, Director of Emerging Technology, Telangana State<\/i><\/b>, \u201cAI 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.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\nEnabling a secure experience across our products<\/b><\/h3>\n
Security is at the core of our product strategy. With the unprecedented growth in India\u2019s internet adoption, and people\u2019s reliance on digital in their everyday lives, the work we do to keep people safe online has never been as important as it is today. We are deepening the role of AI in helping respond to complex and shape-shifting cybersecurity challenges at scale, whether it is detecting malware and phishing, auto denying spam transactions, blocking bad content, or preventing spam messages.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re also working with the National e-Governance Division and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to bring Digilocker-verified documents directly onto the Files by Google App for Android users. With this feature, people can quickly and safely organize their most-used documents on their smartphones for easy and private access on-the-go.<\/p>\n
Shri Abhishek Singh, President & CEO, NeGD and MyGov, MD & CEO, Digital India Corporation,<\/i><\/b> \u201cWith 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\u2019s integration and partnership on Android will drive smoother and ubiquitous access to digitized documents in a safe and secure manner for all our users.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n
On Google Pay, we\u2019re introducing enhanced security features enabling an additional layer of safety for users, including multi-layered intelligent warnings to alert users if the fraud detection system detects suspicious activity.<\/p>\n
As India\u2019s digital ecosystems increasingly adopt and leverage AI, we are committed to sharing the best practices we have been developing since 2018, when we began championing responsible AI. To help build a foundation of fairness, interpretability, privacy, and security, we are supporting the establishment of a first-of-its-kind multidisciplinary Center for Responsible AI with a grant of $1 million to the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.<\/p>\n
Prof. Ravindran, Head – Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBC-DSAI); Center for Responsible AI, IIT Madras,<\/i><\/b> \u201cWith 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, providing strong safety and performance guarantees, and to raise 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.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n
One important dimension of responsible AI is the challenge of mitigating bias, particularly against women, who have long been inadequately or unfairly represented in society. We\u2019re increasing our focus on training natural language processing models to evaluate and mitigate gender bias, along with various other types of discrimination relevant to India. We plan to make our models open source, so we can work with industry to scale our collective efforts and support faster progress.<\/p>\n
To learn more about our AI-led solutions and partnerships, click here.<\/p>\n
As India enters the age of AI, we are deeply inspired by the ways hundreds of millions of Indians are using technology to shape their future, and the nation\u2019s. And we\u2019re committed to harnessing the best of Google\u2019s technology to make sure the benefits and opportunities of digital transformation are shared as widely and equitably as possible over the decade ahead and beyond.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n