Google is increasing its emphasis on India by introducing advanced AI tools to overcome language barriers and improve agricultural practices, according to a senior company representative.
Abhishek Bapna, Director of Product Management at Google DeepMind, underlined the significance of diminishing language barriers for India's economic progress.
“Language is very essential for economic development. For instance, a language barrier should not hinder someone from explaining their medical issues to a doctor or accessing banking services,” Bapna said during his short visit to IIM Calcutta.
The large tech company has introduced Google Gemini, previously known as Bard, a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence that can communicate in over 40 languages worldwide, including nine Indian languages.
Bapna mentioned that Google's primary focus remains on consistently enhancing language quality and expanding support for additional Indian languages in the future.
At present, the chatbot can communicate in nine Indian languages - Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu.
Bapna acknowledged the complexity of India's multilingual environment, where individuals frequently use multiple languages simultaneously.
This poses unique challenges for AI models, as they must accurately identify and utilize the appropriate dictionaries to comprehend and generate precise responses, Bapna explained.
To assist developers in India, Google is extending Project Vaani in partnership with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc).
The project provides developers with more than 14,000 hours of speech data in 58 languages, collected from 80,000 speakers in 80 districts.
In addition, Google has introduced IndicGenBench, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for Indian languages. The objective of this initiative is to evaluate and refine language models for more precise and effective usage in India.
In a parallel endeavour to support India's agricultural sector, Google is working on launching the Agricultural Landscape Understanding (ALU) Research API. This tool, currently in limited availability, aims to make agricultural practices more data-driven and efficient.
The ALU API is designed to improve farm yields, facilitate access to capital, and enhance market access for agricultural products.
"On agriculture, right now we are conducting a pilot with the Telangana government that is already underway. Once the pilot is complete, we plan to scale it up and engage actively with state governments,” Bapna said.
He highlighted that Google’s agricultural initiatives are driven by two major goals: improving livelihoods and addressing climate change through necessary interventions.
"Banks and insurance companies could also be end users. Right now, our focus is to make sure that the technology works properly," Bapna said.
The ALU API is expected to transform India’s agricultural ecosystem by offering granular landscape insights at the farm field level.
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