OGoogle on Wednesday announced a range of tools, programs, and partnerships to help drive innovation in artificial intelligence (AI). At Google I/O Connect Bengaluru 2024, the company said it is working with MeitY Startup Hub to train 10,000 startups in AI, through Google Cloud credits, an AI-focused programming program, and the launch of a national GenAI Hackathon and AI Startup Bootcamp. The company is looking to democratize AI for Indian developers by focusing on three key areas that have transformative potential in India: multimodal, multilingual, and mobile. Developers in India will now have expanded access to Google’s powerful AI models with the 2 million token context window in Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemma 2, the next generation of open models. “AI is a powerful enabler and a major inflection point that will force us to continually reimagine what is possible. We are committed to enabling Indian innovators to harness the full potential of AI, creating solutions that not only meet India’s unique needs, but also shape the future of AI globally,” said Ambharish Kenghe, Vice President, Google. Today, over 1.5 million developers worldwide use Gemini models in its tools. The fastest way to build with Gemini is through its Google AI Studio developer platform, and India has one of the largest developer bases on Google AI Studio today.The Google DeepMind team also shared updates to help developers build language solutions for India. This includes the expansion of Project Vaani, in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), which provides developers with over 14,000 hours of speech data in 58 languages, collected from 80,000 speakers across 80 districts. “India is at the forefront of the AI revolution, as evidenced by the innovation that Indian companies are pioneering. From consumer experiences to agriculture to social enterprises, AI has the power to solve some of the biggest challenges of our time across many sectors and industries,” said Seshu Ajjarapu, Senior Director, Google DeepMind.The team also presented IndicGenBench, a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate LLM generation capabilities on Indian languages, and open source CALM (composition of language models), a framework that allows developers to combine specialized language models with Gemma models.
Read also : How Google is fighting spam in the age of AIAdditionally, Google is introducing Google Wallet APIs to simplify integration with loyalty programs, tickets, and gift cards. For developers using Google Maps Platform, India-specific pricing is being introduced with up to 70% lower costs on most APIs. “At Google, we believe that all developers are AI developers, and we want to make it as easy as possible for them to build with AI across everything — web, mobile, and cloud,” said Jeanine Banks, vice president and general manager, Developer X, Google. “We’ve been thrilled and inspired by the enthusiastic adoption of our AI capabilities by the growing Indian developer ecosystem, and we look forward to seeing the innovations they’ll unleash with Google’s AI models, tools, and expanding app development suite announced today.” » Google is also partnering with the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), offering developers who build for ONDC up to 90% off select Google Maps Platform APIs. The company will also soon launch the Agricultural Landscape Understanding (ALU) search API, a limited-availability tool designed to make farming practices more data-driven and efficient.
