Google expands AI initiative in India, focuses on language barrier, agricultural efficiency
Google is increasing its focus on India by introducing advanced AI tools to break language barriers and improve farming practices, a senior company official said.
Abhishek Bapna, Director of Product Management at Google DeepMind, highlighted the importance of reducing language barriers in India’s economic development.
“Language is essential for economic development. For example, a language barrier should not prevent someone from explaining their medical issues to a doctor or accessing banking services,” Bapna said during her brief visit to IIM Calcutta.
The tech giant has launched Google Geminiformerly known as Bard, an artificial intelligence chatbot that supports over 40 global languages, including nine Indian languages.
Bapna added that Google’s current focus is to continuously improve language quality and expand support for more Indian languages in the future.
Currently, the chatbot supports nine Indian languages - Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
Bapna notes the complexity of India’s multilingual environment, where people often speak multiple languages at once.
This poses particular challenges for AI models, Bapna says, as they must identify and apply the right dictionaries to understand and generate the correct response.
To empower developers in India, Google is expanding Project Vaani in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc).
The project provides developers with more than 14,000 hours of voice data across 58 languages, collected from 80,000 speakers in 80 counties.
Additionally, Google has introduced IndicGenBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed specifically for Indian languages. The initiative aims to evaluate and refine language models for more accurate and efficient use in India.
In a parallel effort to support India’s agriculture sector, Google is working on rolling out the Agricultural Landscape Understanding (ALU) API. This limited-availability tool is designed to make farming operations more efficient and data-driven.
API ALU aims to enhance agricultural productivity, improve access to capital and provide better market access for agricultural products.
“On agriculture, we are currently working on a pilot project with the Telangana government and it has been implemented. Once the pilot project is completed, we plan to scale it up and work actively with state governments,” Bapna said.
He stressed that Google’s agricultural initiatives aim at two main goals: improving livelihoods and addressing climate change through necessary interventions.
“Banks and insurance companies can also be end users. Right now, our focus is on making sure the technology works properly,” said Bapna.
By providing detailed information about the landscape at the field level, the ALU API is expected to transform India’s agricultural ecosystem.
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