Google To Open-Source Research Models And Datasets For India-Focused Solutions

Tech giant Google has partnered with Bengaluru’s research university Indian Institute of Science (IIS) under Project Vaani to open-source research models and datasets to help developers build solutions equipped with India-focused speech data and offer local information. 

According to Manish Gupta, head of Google Research India, the first set of speech data will cover 4,000 hours across 38 languages.

According to an Economic Times report, Gupta said that out of the 125 languages Google is committed to support, 75 had no data available in digital form to AI researchers before. Digital data is going to be made available from some languages for the first time through this project. 

“We could expect innovations in these zero corpus languages now,” Gupta added. 

Adding to this, Google Pay’s vice-president, Product, Ambarish Kenghe said that as there are more than 60 generative AI startups in India, this large language model is going to be made accessible to the AI experts through PaLM API, MakerSuite, and features on Vertex AI.

In addition, Google is already offering Plus Codes for addresses, said Kenghe. According to him, delivery related app developers can leverage this location information, which is available openly. 

This is an AI-powered service that identifies the footprint of a building at a city or district scale based on satellite imagery. This further addresses the challenges of a town planner in tracking the density of a bunch of smaller buildings. Also, as per Google’s experts, this could be beneficial during disaster management or for developers while designing such apps.

Google will also soon be rolling out a Trusted Tester programme for the developers working on healthcare artificial intelligence models to help identify medicine names.

This is not the first time that Google has announced India specific initiatives. Google is also going to launch an accelerator program for ONDC. The programme will help the sellers on ONDC scale their businesses on the platform. 

For this, Google Cloud is going to roll out its startup credits programme under which the startups joining ONDC will be able to apply for a $25,000 grant.

Just days back, following a meeting between Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his recent US visit, Pichai announced that Google is going to set up its global fintech operation centre at the GIFT City in Gujarat. 

Earlier this month, the tech giant announced its Indian Languages Program to offer language support in English, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Malayalam, Gujarati and Marathi, to the small and medium sized vernacular news publishers.