Google for India 2022: Agriculture to Health, AI to Make Indians’ Life Better, Says Tech Giant

The 8th edition of Google For India, to discuss the road map to make India’s digital economy more inclusive, helpful and safer for every Indian, was launched on Monday in the presence of Union Minister of Railways, Communications and Electronics and Information Technology, Ashwini Vaishnaw and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.

Pichai said: “We are working on one powerful AI model which can bring information across thousands of languages…AI will end up playing a powerful role in getting the rich responses.”

“There are multiple areas in which AI is going to make a significant difference. Agriculture is one such, bridging the language gap is another, and then making credit accessible to the people at the bottom of the development cycle,” said Vaishnaw.

Sanjay Gupta, Country Head and Vice-President of Google India, and Manish Gupta, Director of Research at Google India, were among the speakers at the event in Delhi, which was live-streamed on YouTube.

In his opening speech, Sanjay Gupta spoke about India’s technological growth and how AI helps the world accomplish the digital transformation journey, adding that “technology can make everyone’s life better”.

AGRICULTURE AND HEALTHCARE

Manish Gupta said the tech giant was working on a model to help identify the agricultural land to boost digital agriculture in the country. This landscape understanding model was developed in Bengaluru and it is being piloted in Telangana. It can recognise both natural and artificial water bodies as well as fields. The model will also be able to identify events that happened in the fields, like when the crop was sown.

Manish Gupta also elaborated on how Google is working on the healthcare section. He said that sometimes it can be difficult to read handwritten prescriptions, so Google is using AI to make that easy. However, the company is still perfecting this solution.

Apollo is collaborating with Google on a project to aid AI in X-ray tuberculosis detection.

Additionally, the technology is also being used by the tech giant to create a clinical intelligence engine that can be used to identify common diseases, build patient-doctor trust through data-driven clinical expertise, as well as analyse and manage data for better service on Apollo 24/7.

Manish Gupta also announced a $1 million investment in IIT-M for India’s first Responsible AI centre. Two more projects — Project Vaani and Project Bindi — were also announced. YouTube is also partnering with healthcare providers to make sure that quality information can be provided to the people seeking answers.

MORE GOOGLE INITIATIVES

Elizabeth Reid, VP of search at Google, said that in the past five years, India’s internet users have doubled; among all the countries, the highest number of Google Lens users are also from India.

The company also announced that search features will include several Indian languages, along with Hindi, to make it easier for users who speak different local languages. In the near future, this feature will be supported in Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, and Bengali.

It was also said that even if the query includes both English and Hindi words, Google’s technology will help the user find the exact answers.

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