Google announces new AI tools to strengthen India’s agriculture ecosystem

The new Google AI tools can help significantly improve agricultural management on farms and also address the specific needs of each crop—including the right soil and water conditions, growth patterns, and climatic needs—as well as predict crops’ harvest volume.

At the second edition of I/O Connect 2024 developers conclave in Bengaluru in 2024, Google announced generative Artificial Intelligence (gen AI)-powered Agricultural Landscape Understanding (ALU) Research API, which can play a crucial role in understanding the soil quality and weather to help Indian farmers grow crops on time and get good yield.

Now, Google is bringing another innovative gen AI-based Agricultural Monitoring & Event Detection API (AMED API), which goes one step deeper than ALU API. It provides field-level crop data, specifically helping in monitoring crops and detecting agricultural events at individual fields across India.

The AMED API details the type of crop on a given field, crop season, the field’s size, and also provides historical information about the agricultural activity on it for the last three years. 

These insights can help significantly improve agricultural management on farms and also address the specific needs of each crop – including the right soil and water conditions, growth patterns, and climatic needs – as well as predict crops’ harvest volume.

Google will be sharing AMED API for agriculture startups to find more innovative solutions to improve the agriculture ecosystem. 

In a related development, Google, as part of its ‘Amplify Initiative’, is collaborating with IIT-Kharagpur to offer free, structured, hyperlocal and high-quality Indian linguistic and cultural diversity datasets to global startups and also companies. 

The search engine giant, along with Indian government agencies, under Project Vaani, has so far recorded 21,500 hours of speech audio and 835 hours of transcribed speech across 86 unique Indian languages, from more 112,000 speakers across 120 districts and 22 states.

With access to the datasets, international app developers particularly in the healthcare and safety segments, will be able to offer their services in Indian languages such as Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Odia, Bengali, Tamil, Marathi and more.

“The enthusiastic adoption of our foundational and fundamental research across India has been incredibly encouraging, affirming our sustained investments in AI over the past decade. As we look ahead, we remain deeply committed to this collaborative journey, and charting new frontiers that help build an AI-powered future that is truly more inclusive, innovative, and prosperous for all of India,” said Google India.

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