In 2019, Google introduced a reading tutor app for young students in India, powered by Artificial Intelligence. Seeing a classroom full of children discovering a love for books with the help of AI was a moment I’ll never forget.
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By that time, Google had been investing in the underlying technology and breakthroughs for several years. But being in the classroom that day gave me an even clearer sense of AI’s potential to improve lives—and the deep responsibility we have to get it right.
Fast forward to today. Millions of people are using generative AI-powered tools that didn’t exist a year ago. Tools like Bard, our conversational AI interface, which people across the country are using in nine different Indian languages, or our generative AI search experience, called SGE, to get answers to complex questions in both English and Hindi. Yet we are still only in the very early stages of a shift that will drive new waves of innovation, accelerate economic progress and create opportunities for people everywhere.
This opportunity ahead is why we have taken a bold and responsible approach to AI. We are being bold in our ambitions to make sure that we are pursuing applications that can be useful and have an impact. And we are doing it responsibly, guided by the AI principles we established in 2018, which are rooted in the belief that AI should be developed to benefit society while avoiding harmful applications. Our ultimate goal is to make AI more helpful for everyone, everywhere in the world.
There is no doubt in my mind that AI will be the biggest shift we experience in our lifetimes. In India, we see some important drivers of progress that are unique here: first, the energy and ingenuity of the young population who are shaping how the technology is being used. Second, the opportunity that India has to leapfrog and develop the next generation of solutions—similar to what the country has done with digital payments.
Of course, India is already applying AI to make progress in fundamental areas. One example is using AI to make information more accessible to people in their native languages. Google is working with the Indian government to collate and open-source speech data for almost 800 dialects, while our Google Research team in Bengaluru is building a unified model that can handle over 100 different Indian languages.
Other promising opportunities lie in healthcare. Google is partnering with hospitals and nonprofits to apply AI in screening for eye disease, detecting tuberculosis and improving maternal health.
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In agriculture, which employs hundreds of millions of people in India, AI can help transform access to information. For example, the Telangana state government is using Google models to map field health and support sustainable farming, and the nonprofit Wadhwani AI is creating an app to provide accurate crop health data to individual farmers.
One of the most critical areas where generative AI can help is by enabling everyone to succeed in the digital economy. This includes bringing citizen services and programmes to more Indians across the country. To do this, Google Cloud is partnering with Axis My India to build an inclusive and multilingual superapp that helps people access government services, regardless of their language or where they live. Meanwhile, a new generation of ‘AI-first’ Indian developers and startups is emerging to grow the digital economy. Entrepreneurs in our India startups accelerator programme are using AI to discover antibodies, increase access to education, help small businesses reach their customers, and more.
Innovations that start in India are being used worldwide. That early version of our literacy app became Read Along, an online tutor that has helped over 30 million children globally learn to read. Our Flood Hub tool, which uses AI to forecast and help authorities warn at-risk communities, has expanded from India to more than 80 countries and can help predict flooding events a week ahead of time for 460 million people.
India will play an important role in helping to make sure AI is built responsibly. At Google, we are deeply committed to this. We are building new safeguards like our SynthID technology, a tool for watermarking and identifying AI-generated images. We are also engaging government, academia and experts to guide responsible approaches. As one example, we supported the establishment of a first-of-its-kind multidisciplinary Centre for Responsible AI with a grant of $1 million to the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. This centre will help to build a foundation of fairness, interpretability, privacy and security for future AI development.
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Every technology shift is an opportunity to advance scientific discovery, accelerate human progress and improve lives. AI will do this on a scale we haven’t seen before and India is uniquely positioned to play a leading role from the start. I am excited to see all the ways India can harness its potential and unleash a golden era of innovation in the years ahead.
