GenAI is plain vanilla, if you ask the folks at Google India. As the tech behemoth rolled out its ambitious ‘Google for India’ repertoire for their biggest and fastest growing market, there was one familar focus area where further announcements predictably came – Google’s onboarding of Indian languages as a digital tool. And, of course, artificial intelligence (AI) and lots of it.
Well in verse with the parent company’s efforts to take the pole position in AI advancements and grab the thunder back from that petulant upstart called OpenAI is evidently a dream up there on Mountain View (where Google’s global HQ is), and the trickle down effect was well evident in many of the announcements in India on Thursday – Google’s Gemini AI can now go ‘Live’, with real time conversation by adapting to the user. The ‘Gemini Live’ feature is available in 8 Indian languages, besides English.
Google’s next-generation AI project called Astra is at the core of it, and while it is awaited, the slow rollout of its features, the company hopes, will be transformational. For now, there is already AI Overviews expected in Telugu, Tamil, Bengali and Marathi in the coming days, while ‘ask with video’ feature in Search also debuted, starting with English.
With image-based search on Maps, Gemini summarising Google reviews to save time, real-time weather and traffic updates on Maps, Google’s attempt is to make AI work for daily chores, beside the focus on Indian languages to take its tech evangelism to the hinterland.
Another path-breaking endeavour has been in the field of healthcare. Not only is the company tying up with the government’s Ayushman Bharat project to roll out the issuance of the ABHA health ID through Google wallets soon, its iCALL feature whereby a user can call and speak to a health professional live has been expanded to more vernacular languages. And perhaps incredibly, its AI tools are now evolved enough to detect eye issues, TB and even cancer. For instance, TB could apparently be detected through just an audio sample analysis of a person’s sound!
Google also announced a spate of partnerships, right from Adani and CleanMax (for clean energy projects) to Muthoot (for online loan-against-gold) to Glance (skilling).