Google announces initiatives to help India's digital transformation

Tech giant Google declared various initiatives to help India's digital transformation journey, with the aim to broaden the benefits of India's growing digital economy to more people.

The company announced a pilot of the first-ever Google Assistant-enabled, end-to-end vaccine booking flow that will lead users through the procedure of booking a vaccination appointment on the COWIN portal.

“We have worked closely with COWIN to enable this integration, where people everywhere will be able to easily book a vaccine appointment in a more guided manner,” the company stated in a blogpost.

This feature will work in English and eight Indian languages including Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu and will start rolling out in early 2022.

Mr. Sanjay Gupta, Country Head & Vice President, Google India stated that “With the fundamental drivers of digitisation now in position and millions of new users going online, India's goal of becoming a truly digital economy is within sight.”

Google also revealed a feature in Search that will offer users the option to access web pages initially written in other languages and see it in their desired language.

According to the company, this feature will now add up to high-quality web content available to local language users when they search, and they will still be able to view the page in its original source language if they wish.

It is now available in five Indian languages including Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam, with more to come.

The tech giant is developing voice driven experiences in Indian languages by launching the ability to hear search results out loud, for users who find it easier to consume information by listening.

To make Google Pay app more user friendly, it has declared the additional option of Hinglish -- a conversational hybrid of Hindi and English -- on the app.

“The introduction of Hinglish is our effort to make these communications even more intuitive and natural via Google Pay,” the company said.

In cooperation with local authorities, Google has been operating on a range of climate-related efforts in India that can help surface timely and important information, and ensure people's safety.

Google has partnered with the Central Pollution Control Board to bring the latest Air Quality Information to Google Search. It has also partnered with the Indian Meteorological Department to launch Weather Alerts for extreme climatic conditions.

Disclaimer: This information has been collected through secondary research and IBEF is not responsible for any errors in the same.