Google just made a bunch of announcements at its fourth ‘Google for India' event. Alongside the new features for Google Maps Go and Google Pay, the company has also revealed some new features for the Google Assistant, along with changes for its other services to put emphasis on local, Indian content. New changes are being made to Google Now, the Feed and the Google Assistant. Additionally, to give a push to the reach of Indian content, the company is also working with working with more than 100,000 offline Indian language publishers on Project Navlekha. As per Google, it enables local publishers to easily start their website and publish on a branded domain with ease.
Project Navlekha is one step in a three-step process to expand the reach of local content publishers in India. As a second step, Google Go users can now surf any web-page in languages other than English like Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam, and Tamil. They can also listen to the content that’s being displayed on the page with each word being highlighted as it’s read. Finally, the news stories served to a user in the Search Feed will now be sourced from both English and Hindi sources.
The stories are said to be selected using an AI, which learns from the user’s habits. Searching for definitions on Google currently return results in English, but it will also be available in Marathi and Tamil in the coming weeks. Google will also now help with pronunciations and users will be able to see where they need to improve to get a word pronounced right. Shashidhar Thakur, VP, Engineering, Google Search, said, “For Search to be truly helpful, it should bring you useful content, in all the languages you understand.” Google then announced Pravir Gupta, Director of Software Engineering, said, “India loves the Google Assistant.
In fact, Google Assistant usage has tripled in India since last year.” Google Assistant is also getting support for Marathi language and Google says that seven more Indian languages will soon be soon rolled out for it. Some apps like Where Is My Train, Airtel, and Hello English will now be accessible via voice commands over the smart assistant.
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