Google: Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet, highlighted AI investments that the company shared at the Google for India event on Monday. These investments include a multimodal AI model that supports more than 100 Indian languages, bilingual search results pages powered by machine learning (ML) that are launching in India for the first time, and support for a new centre for responsible AI at IIT Madras. Pichai made the following remarks as Ashwini Vaishnaw, the minister for Railways, Communications, and Electronics & Information Technology, was present at the 8th Google for India event: “It is easy to build something which scales across the entire country and this is the opportunity that India has. There’s no better moment to do a startup, even though we are working through a macro-economic situation right now.”
He added, “It’s always special to come back to India, and this trip is significant as it’s my first visit back since the pandemic. As we come out of it, there’s a sense of optimism about the country’s future and the role technology can play to improve lives.”
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Objective of Pichai’s visit to India
According to the Google CEO, he is in India to observe the results of our USD 10 billion, 10-year India Digitization Fund (IDF) and to offer new strategies for advancing India’s digital future.
“That includes our efforts to build a single, unified AI model that will be capable of handling over 100 Indian languages across speech and text – part of our global effort to bring the world’s 1,000 most-spoken languages online and to help people access knowledge and information in their preferred language. We’re also supporting a new, multidisciplinary centre for responsible AI with IIT Madras,” according to Pichai. Notably, Project Relate is an app that can comprehend non-binary communication from speakers. The app is accessible to Hindi users in early 2023 and has the ability to listen, repeat, and understand.
“Search result pages will be bilingual in India for those who want and the feature is already available in Hindi. This feature will be supported in languages Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, and Bengali in the coming days. Voice search can now understand people who speak Hinglish better. Using a new neural network model, which takes the person’s accent, context, etc into account,” he continued. Speaking of YouTube India, which generated over 7,50,000 full-time jobs and 10,000 crores in GDP, Pichai remarked, “YouTube has a 2 billion user base and just health-related videos have over 30 billion views. Aloud is a new AI, ML product, which can dub the original content at no additional cost. This is being rolled out for select health-based creators and partners. Viewers will be able to toggle these videos in a different audio track. As a part of YouTube learning, Courses will soon be available on YouTube in India, which will also enable new monetisation options for creators.”
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More security flags and warnings for fraudulent transactions will be shown on Google Pay
Google Pay will now display more security flags and warnings for fraudulent transactions, according to the Google CEO. Additionally, Google Pay offers voice-based transaction search. The feature of desired friction will aid Google Pay in determining if the transaction is real or fraudulent. It employs ML technology and flashes a warning in the local tongue. Pichai also emphasised the use of AI to identify and recognise essential documents on the Google Files app through connection with DigiLocker for goverment identity documents.
He stated, “It can recognise govt issued documents and neatly arrange them in a folder. Only the user can access these documents and all this data is stored locally on the device. All Android phones will have DigiLocker built into them.” Vaishnaw added that the aim of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is that a society that is digitally empowered must have a thorough legal structure. The development of the Telecom Bill, the Digital Data Protection Bill, and the Digital India Bill is advanced. The government anticipates passing the telecom and digital personal data protection bills during the monsoon session.
He further said, “Once we have our Data Protection Bill, the Telecom Bill, and the Digital India Bill in place, then it creates a robust framework in which we can use some. Of the data sets which are available, public datasets, and then use them and harness the power of technology to provide better solutions, and better services. And our focus is always to see, that rich person can always take care of themselves. Right? Our focus is always on the middle class and the poorer sections of society. As the government, we are very keen to make sure that every section of the society, marginalized sections of the society, are able to get the benefits of technology the way some of us who are better in doubt, a similar level of technology benefits, they should also be able to get. So we’ll be focusing on AI, multiple sectors as well as different sections of society.” The government’s primary areas of concentration for the Digital India programme were also stated by the IT minister.
He said, “Over the last eight years, the vision of digital India has really taken us to a level where we have a very successful, absolutely scalable India stack. And that India stack helped us manage something as big as the Pandemic. Using the COVID platform, which used all the horizontal constructs of the India stack, we were able to deliver vaccines to a billion plus people, actually 2.2 billion vaccine doses. Scheduling for that scale, with all the logistics challenges that we had right. And giving the certificate instantaneously was a massive work. And that was only possible because of technology. The payment system that we have today, the UPI payment system, is phenomenally successful as we speak, it is almost like India’s 55 per cent of India’s GDP transactions are today happening on the UPI, the payment platform that we have. Right. So similar digital platforms we will keep on building for the health system, for logistics for many other sectors. That’s one part.”
“The second part, we’ll be taking the startup ecosystem to tier two cities, and tier three cities. We see so much talent coming out of smaller cities and towns, so we would try to channel that. Third, we will be focusing on very so India has been ranked as the number one talent concentration, geography for AI. Right? So, very recently, in the Network Readiness Index, India was ranked number one on the talent concentration for AI. So we would like to channelize that through a very stable, a very good, very comprehensive legal and regulatory ecosystem,” Vaishnaw further exclaimed.
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