Google AI to help India overcome language barriers, boost agricultural efficiency: Here's how

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Google is intensifying its focus on India with the introduction of advanced AI tools aimed at breaking down language barriers and enhancing agricultural practices, a senior company official said.

Abhishek Bapna, Director of Product Management at Google DeepMind, highlighted the importance of reducing language barriers in India's economic development.

“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.

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The tech giant has launched Google Gemini, formerly known as Bard, an artificial intelligence chatbot that supports more than 40 global languages, including nine Indian languages.

Bapna added that Google's ongoing focus is on continuously improving language quality and expanding support for more Indian languages in the future.

Currently, the chatbot supports nine Indian languages - Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

Bapna noted the complexity of India's multilingual environment, where people often use multiple languages simultaneously.

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This presents unique challenges for AI models, as they must correctly identify and apply the appropriate dictionaries to understand and generate accurate responses, Bapna said.

To empower developers in India, Google is expanding Project Vaani in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc).

The project offers developers over 14,000 hours of speech data across 58 languages, collected from 80,000 speakers in 80 districts.

Additionally, Google introduced IndicGenBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed specifically for Indian languages. This initiative aims to assess and