Google announced that it will be heavily discounting its commercial mapping service, Google Maps Platform APIs, for developers in India, during its developer conference, Google I/O Connect in Bengaluru. The company also announced its collaboration with the Government of India through Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) Startup Hub and Google DeepMind’s tools for agricultural development. Further, Google revealed that it will be extending its advanced AI models Gemini 1.5 and Gemma 2 in India.
Here is everything Google launched:
India-specific pricing for Google Maps API
Google has offered significantly discounted prices to developers in India using Google Maps Platform. Additionally, it has offered a major discount to developers building forONDCusing select Google Maps Platform APIs. While it has not specified the reason for these major change in prices, it is likely motivated by Ola providing a year’s worth of free access to its own mapping API, Ola Maps, to developers using Krutrim. Ola co-founder Bhavish Agarwal has also urged developers to divest from Google Maps specifically and avail Indian services.
Collaborations with the Indian Government
Google will be also collaborating with the MeitY’s StartUp Hub initiative that aims to support and develop AI in India. The company has committed to providingselectAI startups with Google Cloud credits to invest in the cloud infrastructure and computational power and provide knowledge access withprograms that have a AI-first programming and curriculum. It will also host a nationwideGen AI HackathonandSolve for India Startup Bootcamp | AI Edition, by partnering with MeitY Startup Hub and Startup India.
AI for India’s Agricultural Sector
Google will also launch a tool designed to make agricultural practices more data-driven, called Agricultural Landscape Understanding (ALU) Research API. The tool leverages AI and remote sensing to map individual farms and provide insights into the landscape. Google has partnered with the Government of India, IIT Bombay Ninjacart, Skymet, Team-Up to build this product. It is built on Google Cloud in collaboration with the Anthro Krishi team and India’s digital AgriStack.
Open-source resources for Indian language solutions
Google will also be launching a comprehensive benchmark designed specifically for Indian languages called IndicGenBench. The tool allows developers to evaluate the performance of a model and fine-tune it accordingly. IndicGenBench covers 29 languages.
Further, Google also plans to bring to India, its framework that allows developers to combine their specialized language models with Gemma models, called ourCALM(Composition of Language Models). Google said that the tool will enable developers to cater to specific use cases and linguistic variations. For instance, if a developer is building a coding assistant in English, by composing with a Kannada specialist model in CALM, they may be able to offer coding assistance in Kannada as well
Google will also be launching Phase 2 of its project aimed at collecting a dataset of diverse speech across India. Project Vaani,in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science will be expanding to cover all states in India spanning 160 districts. The open-sourced dataset will boost development of technologies such as automatic speech recognition (ASR), speech to speech translation (SST), and natural language understanding (NLU), in a way that caters to as many Indians as possible. Bringing Google’s new AI models and products to India.
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New products come to India
The 2 million token context window on Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemma 2 is now available to all developers in India.Gemini 1.5 Pro is Google’s most advanced model. The company announced that it would be giving developers access to the2 million context window, in June this year. Gemma 2 was announced at Google I/O 2024 in California. The model’s performance “comparable to Llama 3 70B at less than half the size”, said Google. The model was developed to be accessible, cost-effective and customizable for users. Google Wallet APIsis also available in India now.
Resources for developers
Google DeepMind team in India has pioneered a framework that will allow for more accurate AI experiences on phones. The Matformer framework allows developers to “mix and match” different sized Gemini models within a single framework. This framework aims to allow high powered models like Gemini to function while consuming fewer resources.
Google also shared updates for software development products like products like Project IDX and Firebase AI . Further, it launched an an AI Agent that helps with open source project maintainence called Project Oscar. The Project is a reference for developers to create more agents that can assist with building AI.
The conference also displayed 3 AI startups that leverage Gemini to create their products. These included an education AI robot, agri-technology AI platform and a “digital work platform” that allows participants to build datasets for wages.
Also Read:
- Google Outlines Key Principles for AI Regulation, urging lawmakers to fill gaps in existing laws instead of creating new ones
- Google AI Overview Slammed For Inaccurate and Misleading Information
- Integration with Search, Talking Assistants, Learning: Here Are All the Plans Google has for Gemini
- Here are all the products launched at Google’s I/o 2024
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