Yesterday Google announced host of new developments for its brand in India. The biggest announcement at the event was the rebranding of Google Tez as ‘Google Pay’, but on the sidelines an interesting development was announced for the Google Go search app. At its annual ‘Google for India’ event in New Delhi, Google introduced a subtle AI-powered website reading feature, and Google Go can now read along websites in 28 Indian languages.
Google Go is a data-light search platform designed specifically for emerging markets such as India. Google Go was announced at a similar event last year. Now, with the new website reading feature on board, Google Go is expected to increase its appeal across India, especially among the non-English speaking audience.
In a nutshell, the application’s new feature will allow users to listen to web pages. Firstpost’s tech-focused news portal Tech2 reported Google saying that the new AI feature is “powered by natural language processing and speech synthesis AI”. As per the report, Google Go can read in 28 Indian languages smoothly, even when on a 2G connection.
The application relies on minimal use of cellular data, whereas the new feature is aided by artificial intelligence, which helps it determine ‘important’ parts of a page to read. This means that the website-reading feature allows the app to skip irrelevant content.
Besides choosing the language, users will also be able to adjust the speed at which the text is read out. The feature is definitely a welcome move from Google as it will benefit India’s linguistically diverse consumer base. And, Google says that it plans to bring the option of listening to webpages to more Google products.
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