India is playing a key role in helping Google make its search results more natural and intuitive by pushing the limits of the company's natural language understanding, a senior company executive told Moneycontrol.
"Unlike in the United States, new Internet users in India have no preconception about what you should be able to ask or say (to a search engine). Therefore, they just ask it the way they want. This pushes us to really understand natural speech and queries much more aggressively," Liz Reid, Vice President, Google Search told Moneycontrol in an interview.
For example, the percentage of Indians who use voice queries on a daily basis is nearly twice the global average, making it critical to solve for mixed language queries such as Hinglish (a combination of Hindi and English).
"India is a place where if you can't solve that multiple languages query, you're just not meeting users' needs. So it pushes us, but we would expect that as we get better with Hinglish, it can then probably help Spanglish (Spanish and English) or other countries where languages are combined," Reid said.
This is critical for Google, which wants to make its traditional search experience more visual and interactive for users by combining images, sounds, text, and speech to help them find what they're looking for.
According to Reid, India is at the forefront of visual and voice search adoption across the world.
"Innovations in visual, voice, and language search have been fundamental to our work in India and have helped us break many information barriers. We’ve consistently introduced new ways to help more people find relevant information and make the most of the internet," Reid said.
New India-focused initiatives
On December 19, Google announced a range of India-first and India-focused innovations in a bid to better serve the unique needs of people in the country.
The search giant will soon begin piloting the ability for users to search within YouTube videos for any phrase. The feature, which will be available on the Google Search app, will enable users to enter any phrase by tapping the 'Search in video' option, find various occurrences of it in the video, and jump directly to that portion of the video.
"We sort of have improved our understanding of the video, both from an audio and a visual perspective, and have built (artificial intelligence) models that enable us to do this," Reid said.
Google is also bringing the multisearch feature to India, which allows users to search using both text and images simultaneously. The feature will be available in English, with plans to support multiple Indian languages beginning with Hindi in the next year. The feature was first previewed in September last year and was rolled out to US-based users in April this year.
In addition, in an India-first innovation, the company is making its search results pages bilingual by serving users high-quality and relevant content in their native language alongside English results.
This functionality is already available in Hindi and will be expanded to other Indian languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, and Bengali in the coming year.
Also Read: Soon, Google will help you read the bad handwriting on your doctor's prescription
Improving speech recognition for mixed languages
Puneesh Kumar, General Manager of Search at Google India, told Moneycontrol the company is also advancing its speech recognition capabilities to understand people with mixed language queries.
This is being achieved through a new speech recognition model that takes into account the individual’s accents, surrounding sounds, context, speaking styles, among others.
For instance, if someone asks queries such as "cheese kis cheez se banta hai" which has similar sounding words in different languages, such as Hindi and English in this case, the earlier model wouldn't detect it properly but the new model will identify and understand the query better, making it easier for people to find helpful information.
"We have invested in language understanding for over a decade in India. Our language understanding models have helped us make significant progress in delivering helpful results in different languages. Today, all our information products are available in popular Indian languages," Reid said.
Also Read: Google building AI model to support over 100 Indian languages: Sundar Pichai
Google is also working on a way to make products that rely on speech recognition technology, like Google Assistant, more accessible to everyone, especially those with speech impairments or non-standard speech.
The company is currently piloting an app called Project Relate that has been trained to recognise the unique speech patterns of people with non-standard speech to assist them with their information needs. It is currently being piloted with English users in India, with plans to expand to Hindi users in early 2023.
Discover the latest Business News, Sensex, and Nifty updates. Obtain Personal Finance insights, tax queries, and expert opinions on Moneycontrol or download the Moneycontrol App to stay updated!
