Google's India focus for 2023 & beyond: Harness AI to solve huge problems

Under the Google for India Digitization fund, the firm will continue to support innovation ecosystem, with special focus on early-stage and women-led start-ups

All things powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) was the big focus of Google at its flagship event, Google for India. The three big focuses of AI will be harnessing the vast language that India has, its agriculture and its healthcare.

Sanjay Gupta, Country Head and Vice President, Google India, said, “As partners in India’s digital transformation for nearly two decades, we’re deeply inspired by the myriad ways people have woven technology into every aspect of their everyday lives, placing India’s digital transformation at a tipping point. We’re excited about launching concerted efforts with AI to democratise this opportunity and solve for languages, security, and transformation of scaled sectors such as agriculture and healthcare.”

He emphasised that under the Google for India Digitization fund, the firm will continue to support the innovation ecosystem with special focus on early-stage and women-led start-ups.

Among the many partnerships, to better understand the nuances and dialects of the many diverse languages in India, Google is collaborating with the IISC on Project Vaani, where they aim to gather speech data across all 773 districts of India.

“We’re also happy to share that, in order to build a more accessible and equitable Indic internet for everyone, we’ve commenced work towards building a unified model that will be capable of handling over 100 Indian languages across speech and text,” said company executives during the event.

Google announced its efforts to harness advanced AI and Machine Learning capabilities along with remote sensing technology, to develop a model that can help generate a holistic understanding of India’s agricultural landscape. This project will also enable the AgriStack and other solutions for India's agricultural ecosystem, with a focus on identifying farm-level landscape and farm boundaries, and potentially identify crops grown in each field.

In partnership with the state of Telangana, this model will help facilitate agricultural solutions at a field level, and benefit the broader agricultural chain.

One of the most important uses of AI will be healthcare, where Google is using AI to read and transcribe handwritten prescriptions. This will act as an assistive technology for digitizing handwritten medical documents by augmenting the humans in the loop such as pharmacists, however no decision will be made solely based on the output provided by this technology.

Extending its commitment towards Responsible AI, Google announced an investment of $1 million in grants to the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, (IIT-M) to establish the first of its kind multidisciplinary center for Responsible AI.

But some of the most interesting and immediate impact of AI will be in search. Google said that India is one of the leading countries globally using visual and voice search.

Google is making visual search even more natural with the introduction of Multisearch, a major milestone in how people can search for information using images and text simultaneously. Multisearch is available in English in India, and will be coming to many Indian languages in the next year, starting with Hindi.

In an India-first innovation - to make it easier for people who use more than one language to seek and explore information - Google is making search results pages bilingual, for people who prefer it that way.

Using advanced Machine Learning-based translation models and a cross-language search technology, Google can now serve high-quality and relevant content in a local language alongside English results. This functionality has already started rolling out in Hindi, and will be expanding to other Indian languages, including Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, and Bengali, in the coming year.