Taking AI to the Next Level: The New India Playbook

As AI continues to be adopted and implemented in various industries, India is beginning to focus on its potential impact. AI solutions are being developed rapidly, and their influence will be felt in many sectors. Some of the critical areas of focus are its potential to revolutionize and automate processes, identify patterns, predict outcomes, and optimize operations.

Apart from Google India’s USD10 billion, 10-year digitization fund — for the country's digital future — the tech giant is expecting to contribute breakthroughs in AI that could benefit over a billion people.

Google India says it will continue bolstering its efforts to support Indian digital innovators as part of its investments in the country's Digitization Fund. The company plans to give preference to early-stage companies that focus on AI solutions.

The company's AI efforts include creating a single unified AI model that can handle over 100 Indian languages, including speech and text. This effort is part of an international initiative to bring the world's 1,000 most-spoken languages online.

Google India will also introduce bilingual search results pages, first-of-its-kind in India, thanks to advanced Machine Learning-based translation models and cross-language search technology.

Additionally, it partnered with the Indian Institute of Science to create Project Vaani, which aims to collect and transcribe open source speech data from across all 773 districts in India.

Furthermore, Google India is working with the Government of Telangana to employ artificial intelligence for innovation in agriculture that will benefit the state’s approximately 6 million farmers. Teaming up with Cropin, a global ag-ecosystem intelligence provider, Google aims to develop an application to help farmers track land use.

Rama Devi, director of emerging technology at Telangana State, said, “We want to leverage AI to boost the economic contribution of agriculture while impacting lives at scale. Our collaboration with Google will play a critical role in enabling agriculture solutions at a field level and sharing that data with the wider ecosystem so that participants across the value chain benefit.”

Google is also supporting the establishment of a multidisciplinary Center for Responsible AI with a grant of USD1 million to the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. The center will be dedicated to building foundational principles like fairness, interpretability and privacy when using AI.

Prof. Ravindran, head of the Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBC-DSAI) at the Center for Responsible AI in IIT Madras, said, “The Center for Responsible AI is a first-of-its-kind initiative in India that aims to bring together technologists, sociologists, policy and legal experts from academia, industry and the government to study all aspects of this domain called Responsible AI. We thank Google for partnering with us on this initiative and for being the first collaborator of the center.”

Image credit: iStockphoto/Mustafa Kaya