One billion Indians will be online by 2025: Sanjay Gupta, Google India head

One billion Indians will come online by 2025, Sanjay Gupta, country head and vice president of Google India, said at an event in Delhi on Monday. “The Indian internet story has come of age,” Gupta said, while delivering a keynote at the Google for India event in Delhi on December 19, noting that India already has 700 million internet users and is on a “momentum that will bring a billion Indians online by 2025.” 

“Technology has the potential to become the single largest contributor to India’s economy. With the power of AI (artificial intelligence), we can democratise opportunity by building ramps through language, video, and safety,” Gupta added. Google announced a host of new AI products and initiative meant for Indian users at the event. 

The company said that it will be making search results pages bilingual, and also launched a new speech recognition model that can understand ‘Hinglish’. Google is also piloting an initiative called Project Relay, which aims to recognise speech patterns of those with voice and speech impairments, and add them to the company’s ability to recognise Hindi within its products. The project was first launched in 2019, as Project Euphonia back in 2019 with similar goals, but for other languages. 

Further, the company announced a partnership with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, and robotics firm AI & Robots Technology Park (Artpark) to unveil an all-India inclusive language data initiative for open-sourcing datasets.  

Other major initiatives announced at the Google India 2022 event include machine learning models for identifying text from handwritten doctor prescriptions, innovations for digital agriculture in India, and using deep learning techniques for fraud detection in Google Pay, among others.