Science

Google I/O Connect Conference Bengaluru: Key Takeaways From The Event

June 29, 2023
Bharat Times English News

On Wednesday, Google introduced some new AI-powered tools for Indian developers at its first India-specific I/O Connect conference in Bengaluru. These tools aim to improve user experiences, promote digitization and drive industry growth. During the conference, Google launched a new feature in its Maps called Address Descriptors. From showcasing their support for Open Network Digital Commerce (ONDC) to sharing new updates on AI tools, here are the key announcements from the event.

LLM Model

At the event, the company said that developers in India can now access its new Large Language Model (LLM) PaLM 2. Through this language model, Google aims to bring AI capabilities to all of its products such as Gmail, Google Docs, and Bard. According to Google, PaLM 2 has been trained on multilingual texts from over 100 languages.

Apart from this, the company also said that generative AI support is now available on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI. On 28 June, Google India tweeted announcing the availability of the model for Indian developers.

Google tweeted, “Developers in India will now have access to both the PaLM API and Makersuite.”

project vani

Google launched Project Vanni in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) last year to collect anonymised speech data from people in 773 districts of India. At I/O Connect Bengaluru, Google announced that IISc is open-sourcing the datasets it has collected over a year. This will give developers access to over 4,000 hours of speech data in 38 languages, collected from over 10,000 speakers across 80 districts. It can be used by companies to build their own technology and applications to meet the needs of their customers.

Support to ONDC

Google extended its support for Open Networking Digital Commerce (ONDC) by providing an accelerator program for it. This will help the business to enhance their digital operations and commerce. It will help developers enhance their search experiences across their network by giving them access to retail search and discovery AI.

It also announced a startup credit program for organizations that enable ONDCs to receive a grant of $25,000.

better map

I/O Connect Bengaluru 2023 saw the launch of Google Maps’ latest India-specific feature, which will enable developers to help their customers find addresses easily. This feature, called Address Descriptor, is an India first and is available in over 25 cities. It will help the customers to find the address through nearest landmarks and area names.

Project Bindi

Google last year launched Project Bindi under which they evaluate and mitigate biases in natural language processing in the Indian socio-cultural context. Now, it claims that it has created a massive Seagull database that includes datasets that address the stereotypes that exist in India. Google is now open-sourcing the data and will be available to developers from next month.

Outsourcing the Open Buildings Dataset

Google will also outsource its Open Buildings dataset, which is currently based on satellite images of over 200 million buildings in India. With this, it aims to help developers in urban planning, environmental science and more.