Google announces new AI tools for Indian developers at I/O Connect Bengaluru

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Google announces new AI tools for Indian developers at I/O Connect Bengaluru

Google Wednesday announced several new AI-powered tools to empower developers across the country as it held its first India-specific I/O Connect developers conference in Bengaluru.

The company announced a new feature within the Google Maps Platform called address descriptors, an India-first experiment available in over 25 cities. It is a feature designed to make it easy for customers to find and navigate to addresses using landmarks and area names.

Google, in collaboration with IISC Bengaluru, has been working on an initiative called Project Vani to digitalise Indian languages using AI, and the company has now open-sourced all data, which includes 38 languages and 4,000 hours of speech data, to developers.

Google Cloud officially launched a new initiative in collaboration with Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), under the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, to help sellers build and scale commerce platforms across the country. Similarly, the company is also open-sourcing a ready implementation of ONDC infrastructure and core APIs to facilitate scalability and security using retail AI technology and the PaLM API.

Similarly, Google also announced a new startup credit program where companies that use ONDC can apply for a grant of $25,000. At the event, the company also announced that Google’s AI tools like the PaLM API, MakerSuite, and Vertex AI will now be available for Indian developers.

Google also showcased several upcoming AI-powered tools, such as Studio Bot, which will help developers code more easily.

The company also confirmed that the smartwatch category has seen a two-fold growth in India, and the country is also one of the largest markets for smart TVs in the world.