Google for India event 2022: New AI initiatives launched in India - Project Vaani, Multisearch and more

Google for India event 2022: The US-based tech giant Google on Monday announced a slew of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered initiatives to address language divide on the Internet, supporting digitisation of farmland in partnership with the Telangana government, and new investments to drive responsible development of AI in the country.

Project Vaani

The company announced a collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru (Project Vaani), to capture diverse Indian dialects for building better AI language models. The move is aimed at collecting and transcribing open source speech data from across all of India's 773 districts, making it available through the Centre's 'Bhashini' project in the future, the company said during its annual flagship 'Google For India' event here.

Google has also announced new innovations across Search, focusing on bilingual users' needs and new search capabilities using camera and voice; new fraud detection model for secure digital payments on Google Pay; and integration with Digilocker in the Files by Google app on Android to allow for easy access to key digital documents, privately and safely.

Google has set a goal to build a single, unified model, capable of handling over 100 Indian languages across both speech and text, paving the way for a more inclusive experience for many more Indian language speakers. The company is making visual search even more natural with the introduction of Multisearch. It is available in English in India and will come to many Indian languages in the next year, starting with Hindi.

The company also announced a new $1 million grant via Google.Org to Wadhwani AI towards using advanced technology for better agricultural outcomes. Google has been piloting 'Project Relate' -- an app that is trained to unique speech patterns of people with non-standard speech.

The company has been piloting the app with English users in India, and will expand this to Hindi users in early 2023. Google also announced a collaboration with the National eGovernance Division (NeGD) to enable people with easy access to their authentic digital documents, directly from the Files by Google app on Android