Google announces initiatives to help India's digital transformation

With the aim to extend the benefits of India's growing digital economy to more people, tech giant Google on Thursday announced several initiatives to help India's digital transformation journey.

The company announced a pilot of the first-ever Google Assistant-enabled, end-to-end vaccine booking flow that will guide users through the process of booking a vaccination appointment on the COWIN website.

"We have worked closely with COWIN to enable this integration, where people everywhere will be able to easily book a vaccine appointment in a more guided manner," the company said in a blogpost.

This feature will work in English and eight Indian languages including Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu and will begin rolling out in early 2022.

"With the fundamental drivers of digitisation now in place and millions of new users coming online, India's goal of becoming a truly digital economy is within sight," said Sanjay Gupta, Country Head & Vice President, Google India.

Google also announced a feature in Search that will give users the option to access web pages originally written in other languages and see it in their preferred language.

According to the company, this feature will now make high-quality web content available to local language users when they search, and they will still be able to view the page in its original source language if they prefer.

It is now available in five Indian languages including Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam, with more to come.

The tech giant is expanding voice driven experiences in Indian languages by introducing the ability to hear search results out loud, for users who find it easier to consume information by listening.

To make Google Pay app more user friendly, it has announced the additional option of Hinglish -- a conversational hybrid of Hindi and English -- on the app.

"The introduction of Hinglish is our attempt to make these interactions even more intuitive and natural via Google Pay," the company said.

In collaboration with local authorities, Google has been working on a range of climate-related efforts in India that can help surface timely and important information, and ensure people's safety.

Google has partnered with the Central Pollution Control Board to bring the latest Air Quality Information to Google Search. It has also partnered with the Indian Meteorological Department to launch Weather Alerts for extreme climatic conditions.

--IANS

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