JOIN USTech giant Google on Tuesday rebranded its payments app ‘Tez’ as ‘Google Pay’ as part of its efforts to take the digital payments app to more online and retail merchants across the country.
The tech giant at the fourth edition of its annual ‘Google for India’ event, announced plans to bring more access to technology, more relevant product experiences in more languages to users in India.
Rajan Anandan, VP, India and Southeast Asia, said that the big three themes that will define the future of India’s Internet will be “Voice, Video, and Vernacular.”
“Voice has been emerging as the preferred mode of use for new Internet users. We’re seeing major growth of voice queries in India. Furthermore, online video now accounts for 75% of all mobile traffic. And as for vernacular, the majority of the Internet users today are Indian language users, a number expected to reach 500 million plus in the next two years. 95% of video consumption is in vernacular languages,” he said.
Google announced three launches towards the goal of expanding the reach of Indian content. First, Google is working with over 1 lakh offline Indian language publishers on Project Navlekha, which allows them to easily start their website and publish on a branded domain with a few simple clicks. Second, users of the Google Go app can pull up any web page in English, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam, and Tamil, and listen to it with each word lighting up as it’s read. Finally, the Search feed will display users’ favourite topics of interest as well as news, from both English and Hindi sources, using AI that learns users’ interests to surface stories they would most likely want to read.
Pravir Gupta, Director of Software Engineering, said, “India loves the Google Assistant. In fact, Google Assistant usage has tripled in India since last year.”