Jaishankar meets Google CEO Sundar Pichai, discusses India's digital transformation
Dec 20, 2022
New Delhi [India], December 20 : External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Tuesday met Google CEO Sundar Pichai and discussed India's digital transformation and global strategic developments.
Taking to Twitter, Jaishankar said, "Great to meet CEO, @Google and Alphabet, @sundarpichai today afternoon. Discussed India's digital transformation and global strategic developments."
Earlier on Monday, Pichai met Prime Minister Narendra Modi and said it is inspiring to see the rapid pace of technological change under his leadership.
CEO of Google and Alphabet, said he looked forward to continuing strong partnership and supporting India's G20 presidency to advance open internet that works for all.
"Thank you for a great meeting today PM @narendramodi. Inspiring to see the rapid pace of technological change under your leadership. Look forward to continuing our strong partnership and supporting India's G20 presidency to advance an open, connected internet that works for all, Pichai said in a tweet.
India formally assumed G20 Presidency on December 1 this year from Indonesia.
On Monday, Pichai attended the 8th edition of the Google for India event, with Ashwini Vaishnaw, minister for Railways, Communications and Electronics & Information Technology in attendance.
Addressing the audience at the event Pichai said, "It is easy to build something which scales across the entire country and this is the opportunity that India has. There's no better moment to do a startup, even though we are working through a macro-economic situation right now."
"It's always special to come back to India, and this trip is significant as it's my first visit back since the pandemic. As we come out of it, there's a sense of optimism about the country's future and the role technology can play to improve lives," he added.
The Google CEO said he is here to see progress being made from our USD 10 billion, 10-year India Digitization Fund (IDF), and share new ways helping to advance India's digital future.
"That includes our efforts to build a single, unified AI model that will be capable of handling over 100 Indian languages across speech and text - part of our 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. We're also supporting a new, multidisciplinary centre for responsible AI with IIT Madras," said Pichai.
Notably, Project Relate is an app that can understand people with non-binary speech. It can listen, repeat, and understand, and the app is available for Hindi users in early 2023.
"Search result pages will be bilingual in India for those who want and the feature is already available in Hindi. This feature will be supported in languages Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, and Bengali in the coming days. Voice search can now understand people who speak Hinglish better. Using a new neural network model, which takes the person's accent, context, etc into account," he added.
Speaking about YouTube India which contributed 10,000 crores to GDP by creating over 7,50,000 full-time jobs, Pichai said,
"YouTube has a 2 billion user base and just health-related videos have over 30 billion views. Aloud is a new AI, ML product, which can dub the original content at no additional cost. This is being rolled out for select health-based creators and partners. Viewers will be able to toggle these videos in a different audio track. As a part of YouTube learning, Courses will soon be available on YouTube in India, which will also enable new monetisation options for creators."
The Google CEO further stated that Google Pay will show more security alerts and warnings now for suspicious transactions. Google Pay also gets transaction search via voice feature. Desirable friction is a feature that will help Google Pay determine if the transaction is genuine or fake. It uses an ML algorithm and flashes a warning in the regional language.
