Google announces new India-specific product features for local language access

Google announced a slate of new product features aimed at extending the benefits of India’s growing digital economy to more people through more local language and voice support in search, digital payments and vaccine slot booking.

In an India first initiative, Google unveiled a feature that will enable people to hear search results out loud, making it easier for users who prefer consuming information by listening. Aiming to expand voice driven experiences in local languages, this feature will be available in Hinglish and five Indian languages including Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, and Tamil, and will be extended to other Google Search experiences in the future.

Google added it is piloting the first-ever Google Assistant-enabled, end-to-end vaccine booking flow in India. Google Assistant-enabled, end-to-end vaccine booking flow will guide users through the process of booking a vaccination appointment on the COWIN website with voice guidance in English and eight Indian languages at each step. Google has worked closely with COWIN to enable this integration, where even a relatively new internet user will now be able to easily book a vaccine appointment. This feature will be available in Chrome on Android and will begin rolling out in early 2022.

A new feature in Search will give users an option to access web pages from other languages and view it in their preferred local language. Google said the feature stems from a key challenge with local language queries and the lack of adequate local language content available on a topic to deliver high quality results. Now, when searching in a local language, if Google is not able to locate websites that have information in that language, it will find content on pages that may be in other languages and translate these into the language of the user’s query.

The announcements were made at ‘Google for India’, an annual event being held for the seventh year. ‘Google for India’ is known to bring India-centric features to its product portfolio. Last year, the technology giant launched $10 billion Google for India Digitization Fund.

“Across people, businesses, and institutions, the outbreak of COVID-19 has catapulted India’s adoption of digital to unprecedented levels. With the fundamental drivers of digitization now in place, and millions of new users coming online, India’s goal of becoming a truly digital economy is within sight,” said Sanjay Gupta, Country Head & Vice President, Google India.

It is now imperative that Google steps up its efforts in building products that are even more inclusive of India’s diverse and unique needs, Gupta added, so that the advantages of this crucial transformation are accessible to everyone.

“We hope these improvements go a long way towards helping local language users access relevant information. We’re looking forward to bringing these and many more language-based features to Google products, to help advance the Indian internet ecosystem,” said Pandu Nayak, Vice President, Search and Google Fellow.

Google said today’s announcements underline Google’s growing focus on product innovations that will help new Internet users in India get easier access to information in Indian languages, create more natural ways for local language speakers to interact with the internet, make the Android experience more helpful, and provide support to India’s small businesses and youth.

Union Minister of State for IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar invited Google to further help India realise its $1 trillion digital economy goal by 2025. “I’m hopeful and confident that Google’s mentorship through this initiative will help selected startups emerge stronger in this post-Covid new normal. I would like to invite Google and the rest of the industry to participate in India’s $1 trillion digital economy mission, which will pave the way for the rest of the world,” he said.

The number of Indians using voice queries daily is nearly two times the global average, and one-third of Google Assistant users in India are communicating with it in local languages for needs big and small, Google said.

“Over the last few years, we’ve strived to reduce this complexity and remove barriers to information, especially with innovations in speech recognition and language understanding. India continues to be a global leader in the adoption of these technologies,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, Senior Vice President, Google.

With a goal to simplify digital payments, Google Pay launched an additional option of selecting Hinglish as a preferred language on Google Pay. With this addition, users will be able to navigate the app in the language of their preference, with Hinglish as an option to mirror how a large section of Indians interact naturally. Google Pay also launched speech to text, which allows users to use voice as an input to add account numbers into the app to initiate a payment and an additional feature to split bills for shared expenses within a group.

“With over 10 million merchants now on Google Pay for Business, and many more joining the fold of digital payments every day, we are making it easy for merchants and micro-entrepreneurs to create an online presence directly from the Google Pay for business app,” said Ambarish Kenghe, Vice President, Product Management, Google Pay.

Kenghe also spoke on the launch of ‘MyShop’, through which merchants will be able to build a storefront where they will be able to add images, descriptions of their products, and prices in an easy and intuitive way, then share the link across Google surfaces and beyond Google on social media.

Union Minister for Education Skill Development Dharmendra Pradhan also spoke at the event. He said digital literacy is life changing and can improve employability. “Digital skills are critical to be future ready. Demand for skilled labour in India will increase by 20 times by 2024 with an addition of 1.3 million jobs to the digital economy.”