Google Gemini Surpasses 450 Million Monthly Active Users; Expands AI Push in India

Also Read: Bharti Airtel Offers Free Perplexity Pro AI Subscription to All Customers

Airtel Partnership with Perplexity AI

Indian telecom operator Bharti Airtel has also announced a partnership with Perplexity, an AI-powered search and answer engine, to offer a complimentary 12-month subscription to Perplexity Pro—worth Rs 17,000—to all its 360 million customers across mobile, broadband, and DTH services.

The Gemini app was officially launched in India in June 2025. Both the basic and advanced versions of the app, which provide access to Google’s latest AI models, are now available in nine Indian languages: Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. Android users can access Gemini via the standalone app, Google Assistant, or through select gestures and voice commands on compatible devices.

Also Read: Airtel and Google Partner to Offer Google One Subscription to Postpaid and Wi-Fi Users

Google Expands AI Initiatives in India

In a broader push to strengthen India’s AI ecosystem, Google unveiled several initiatives at its Google I/O Connect India 2025 event held in Bengaluru. A key announcement was the localisation of onshore processing for Gemini 2.5 Flash, aimed at delivering low-latency AI performance for Indian developers, particularly in regulated sectors such as healthcare, finance, and governance.

Additionally, Google announced partnerships with three startups—Sarvam, Soket AI, and Gnani—under the India AI Mission to develop indigenous AI models based on its open-source Gemma architecture. Sarvam’s recently released Sarvam-Translate model was cited as a notable example of this collaboration.

Furthering its commitment to language inclusion, Google is also working with IIT Bombay’s BharatGen to enhance automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) technologies for Indic languages, according to multiple media reports.

Also Read: OpenAI and IndiaAI Mission Partner to Launch OpenAI Academy in India

Google AI to Strengthen Indian Agriculture

Google has introduced new open-source AI innovations and initiatives aimed at strengthening India’s agriculture sector and making AI models more responsive to the country’s linguistic and cultural diversity. “Our AI research is helping the ecosystem strengthen Indian agriculture, and is bringing the country’s linguistic and cultural diversity to global models,” the company said.

In a July 10 statement, Google announced the launch of the Agricultural Monitoring and Event Detection (AMED) API, which builds upon the Agricultural Landscape Understanding (ALU) Research API. The AMED API offers field-level crop data to support monitoring crops and detecting agricultural events at individual fields across India.

AMED API

“The AMED API details the type of crop on a given field, crop season, the field’s size, and also provides historical information about the agricultural activity on it for the last three years. These insights can help significantly strengthen agricultural management on farms, contributing to addressing the specific needs of each crop – including the right soil and water conditions, growing habits, and climatic needs – as well as predicting harvest volume. And as the data is refreshed nearly every two weeks, partners leveraging the AMED API are able to access continuously updated information that accounts for field-level changes and agricultural events,” the Google India team shared in a blog post.

Google noted that innovators have already used the ALU API for unique solutions. “TerraStack, incubated at IIT-Bombay, has built a rural land intelligence system that can support rural lending, land record modernization, and help determine vulnerability of farms to climate risk. The system uses the ALU API to identify farm boundaries and detect potential encroachment and changes in land ownership, which is a crucial factor in the support farmers avail from both the public and private sector.”

The AMED API was developed by Google DeepMind in collaboration with the Google Partnerships Innovation team. TerraStack is currently exploring AMED API use cases for rural lending. “We look forward to seeing the many ways India’s developer ecosystem builds solutions that deeply support India’s farmers, helping uplift the country’s agricultural productivity,” Google added.

Also Read: India Developing Indigenous AI-Native Telecom Technologies

Amplify Initiative and Language Diversity

Google also announced a collaboration with researchers at IIT Kharagpur to bring its Amplify Initiative to India. The program aims to provide the global language developer ecosystem with free, structured, hyperlocal, and high-quality datasets on India’s linguistic and cultural diversity.

“This initiative aims to bridge knowledge gaps within Large Language Models with localized data – including different languages, dialects, and cultural nuances missing from current AI training – enabling models to better serve people in meaningful and relatable ways,” the blog post added.

As part of the Amplify Initiative in India, Google said its local partner will begin building datasets related to specific issues, including in healthcare and safety, in multiple Indic languages.

Indian Startups Leverage Google AI

Google also highlighted how Indian startups are leveraging its AI capabilities. For instance, Sarvam AI is using the Gemma model family to contribute to India’s sovereign AI ambition. “Cropin has leveraged Gemini to build the world’s first real-time agri-intelligence solution, Cropin Sage, which has already helped a leading US-based agri-processing company, among others, to de-risk and future-proof its supply chain against potential climate-related shocks. Manipal Hospital has built an assistive system with Gemini that has reduced the time nurses take to hand over patients between shifts by more than half, enabling them to instead focus more on patient care.”

“As we look ahead, we remain deeply committed to this collaborative journey, and charting new frontiers that help build an AI-powered future that is truly more inclusive, innovative, and prosperous for all of India,” Google concluded.