Google is building an AI model to support over 100 Indian languages

Google, the world's most popular search engine, is working on making text and voice internet searches available in over 100 Indian languages, CEO Sundar Pichai said on Monday.

Pichai, who is visiting India, acknowledged the incredible pace of technological change in the country and the application of AI in sectors like agriculture and healthcare.

“I’m here to see progress being made from our $10 billion, 10-year India Digitization Fund (IDF)", he said -  an investment the search giant announced in July 2020  to help accelerate the adoption of digital services in the country.

Some of the plans of the investment included building a single, unified AI model that will be capable of handling over 100 Indian languages across speech and text – part of its global effort to bring the world’s 1,000 most-spoken languages online, and to help people access knowledge and information in their preferred language.

"Google is now making search results pages bilingual in India by tapping into its advanced ML (Machine Learning)-based translation models and cross-language search technology," said Sanjay Gupta, Google’s Country Head and Vice President, in India.

The search giant also says it has joined hands with the Indian Institute of Science on ‘Project Vaani’ – an initiative that aims at collecting and transcribing open source speech data from across all of India’s 773 districts, making it available through the Government of India’s Bhashini project.