Google has considered India as a major market for its products and services. In line with that, the tech giant has started holding an event annually in India, especially focused on the country. This event is called the Google for India event, and the fifth iteration of the event just went down in the books. In this event, the tech giant announced a bunch of interesting updates, products and services. These included updates to Google Pay, Google Search, Google Assistant, Google Lens, and Google AI. There is no doubt that followed by these announcements, Google is going to roll out these updates for its products soon, and these updates will be crucial for Google users, which we all are in some way or the other. Hence, here is a short windup of the entire event covering the major announcements that Google has made for India.
Partnership With BSNL, Regional Language Support and More
Google has launched Google Station in India as one of its major projects to bring fast Wi-Fi-based internet connectivity to mobile phone users. As the name suggests, Google has brought this service to provide secure and fast internet connectivity to 400 stations in India. Now, in a new turn, the tech giant has announced a partnership with the state-led telecom operator, BSNL helped by which it will launch the WiFi connectivity to villages in Gujarat, Bihar, and Maharashtra. Google has also announced that it will roll out support for more languages which include Oriya, Urdu, and Punjabi on the Discover section, and other languages like Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, and also Kannada and Malayalam for Google News.
Also, keeping in mind that India has a massive population which still uses 2G feature phones, Google has announced a Vodafone Idea Phone Line. The Vodafone Idea subscribers will be able to call a single number - 000-800-9191000, and then get their queries answered. This new initiative is supported by Google Assistant. There will also be a new Interpreter Mode on Assistant, on Android and Android Go phones which is to be launched in the coming months. This new mode will help with real-time translation in English and Hindi using Google Assistant.
Google Pay for Business and Tokenised Cards
Now merchants will be able to create customised branded commercial experiences with the help of Spot platform, which will merge the gap between the online and offline world. Google has announced that some of the notable companies like UrbanClap, Goibibo, RedBus have already signed up for it. Besides this, Google is also offering ‘tokenized’ cards for debit and credit cardholders. Google has said that it will roll out these cards in the upcoming weeks for Visa cards with HDFC, Axis, Kotak, and Standard Chartered banks.
Lastly, Google has also announced a special Google Pay for Business app to help small and medium-sized merchants to enable digital payments without going through a lot of hassle. Google will also be rolling out a new feature for entry-level job seekers which are not easily discovered online. The service will use Machine Learning to recommend jobs.
