Google for India 2022 highlights: DigiLocker integration with Files app on Android and more

Google Pay to get new security feature to detect fraud and help users thwart cyber criminals from stealing their money

Last year, during Google for India event, the search engine giant pledged to invest Rs 75,000 crore in India in the next five to seven years to boost the digital economy.

Now, Google has reaffirmed its commitment to the subcontinent and work on creating a secure digital ecosystem, AI (Artificial Intelligence) to improve user experience online, build India-region-specific products, and also feature integration with Android and more.

“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. As access continues to broaden, connectivity must become rewarding for all people everywhere, and enable everyone to seamlessly move up the digital value chain for individual progress. We’re excited to launch concerted efforts with AI to democratize this opportunity and solve for languages, security, and transformation of scaled sectors such as agriculture and healthcare. And under the Google for India Digitization fund, we continue to support the innovation ecosystem with a commitment to support early-stage and women-led start-ups,” said Sanjay Gupta, Country Head and Vice President, Google India.

Here are highlights of the Google for India 2022 event:
1) As part of the India Digitisation Fund investments, Sundar Pichai CEO, of Google & Alphabet said the company will be offering help to early-stage companies with a particular focus on women-led startups.

2) Google promises to offer bilingual search results related to regions. In that aspect, engineers are studying and feeding more than 100 Indian languages and dialects to ML-based translation models and cross-language search technology to serve Indic language internet users better than ever.

The company is collaborating with the Indian Institute of Science (Bengaluru) on ‘Project Vaani’ —to collect and transcribe open-source speech data from across all of India’s 773 districts. It will be made available through the Government of India’s Bhashini project. Google also showcased a live demo of the AI feature, which was even capable of reading almost unrecognisable medicine names written on doctor's prescription note.

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3) Google is working with the Telangana state government on an AI model to improve the agriculture sector in terms of tracking land use, improving yield and bringing digital services to farmers nationwide

4) Also, with the increased number of people coming online, Google is working on early detection of cyber threats and respond faster to resolve the issue at the earliest. It is focusing on detecting malware and phishing, auto-denying spam transactions, block bad content, and prevent spam messages.

5) Google Pay to get new security features for users paying digitally, including multi-layered intelligent warnings to alert users if the fraud detection system detects suspicious activity

6) Google announced another collaboration with National eGovernance Division (NeGD) to enable people with easy access to their authentic digital documents (DigiLocker feature), directly from the Files by Google app on Android phones.

This will offer more layers of security to personal information and digital IDs offered by the Government of India and also can be securely accessed anytime and anywhere.

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7) To create new standards and commitment to fairness, interpretability, privacy, and security in using AI, Google is offering a $1 million (approx. 8,25,97,950) grant to the Indian Institute of Technology (Madras) to establish a first-of-its-kind multidisciplinary Center for Responsible AI

YouTube has become hub of knowledge and entertainment in India. Credit: YouTube India

YouTube
YouTube, which is second only to Google as the most preferred search engine around the world including India, offers almost everything such as information, entertainment and even earn livlihood for content creators.

As per the Oxford Economics study, YouTube’s creative ecosystem contributed over Rs 10,000 crore to the country’s GDP in 2021 and supported more than 750,000 full-time equivalent jobs in India.

In 2021, which saw the second and third wave of Covid-19 and also the roll-out of vaccination programme in India, YouTube registered more than 30 billion views on health-related content, and thanks to the proper system in place, the content was moderated with AI and human editors to cleanse the platform of fake videos and boost genuine content in multiple languages Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati, and Bengali.

Sometimes, the content which is widely received in one language for instance in Kannada, may not be available in Hindi. So, to offer authentic dubbing, Google is introducing the Aloud feature, which can instantly translate voice into multiple Indian languages.

Besides Health, Google's YouTube is also a great platform for people and students to improve their skill sets. In India, the video-sharing platform has a data trove of 60 million plus videos related to digital skills and subjects covered in most school syllabus.

Also read | YouTube brings new bot detection, spam blocking feature

And, in a 2021 survey, one in two Indians, looked up YouTube to develop skills to further their career.

However, for some genuinely good content creators, the reach is limited and if given training, they will be able to deliver better videos and earn more. So, to support them, YouTube is bringing a new monetization option to select a few qualified creators to offer free or paid Courses to provide in-depth, structured learning experiences for viewers.

Also, for viewers, Google is starting new 'Courses' on YouTube (beta) who are interested in going deeper to learn about a subject and improve their skill set.

Must read | Our responsibility goes beyond removing policy-violative content: YouTube India

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