Google's Hema Budaraju shares why India is crucial to the future of AI innovation in search

Hema Budaraju, Senior Director, Product Management, Search at Google.

India is the ideal place to innovate rapidly as Google builds for the new artificial intelligence (AI)-driven digital future, where everything will be at users' fingertips – be it text, voice, gesture, or video, a senior Google Search executive told Moneycontrol.

"Indian users are amazing adopters of technology, and are at the cutting edge of using most of our innovations in compelling ways. This sets the bar high, especially when you look at the usage of voice, image, and multilinguality," said Hema Budaraju, senior director of product management for search at Google.

More people use Google Lens, the visual search tool, in India every month than in any other country worldwide. In fact, Lens usage has almost doubled in India over the last 18 months, she said.

Budaraju mentioned that more people in India also search with voice compared to any other country worldwide. The percentage of Indians using voice queries daily is nearly twice the global average.

"This is why I believe if we are able to bring the best of search and AI to everyone in India - where there are hundreds of millions of people, with different skill level, language contexts, and usage patterns, from users to businesses, publishers, and creators - I think the future is so strong," she said.

On October 3, Google announced plans to extend its AI-powered search experience, AI Overviews, to four Indian languages, including Tamil, Telugu, Bengali and Marathi, in the coming weeks. This move comes about two months after the tech giant introduced AI Overviews in English and Hindi languages to consumers in India in August.

The feature provides consumers a quick AI-generated summary of a topic along with links to go deeper, at the top of the search results. Google also offers several India-first features such as the ability to listen to search responses and toggle between English and Hindi results, both of which were piloted as part of the Search Generative Experience (SGE) experiment in the country last year.

In their testing, Budaraju said, the company noticed that Indian users listen to AI Overviews responses more often than other countries.

Capitalising on voice searches and Lens adoption

With over 40 percent of Gemini's Indian language users relying on voice interactions in India, Google also appears keen to tap into this growing trend. The firm's AI voice chat feature, Gemini Live, is launching in Hindi, with support for eight more Indian languages - Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil and Urdu - expected in the coming weeks.

Additionally, Google is capitalising on the increasing adoption of Google Lens in India with an experiment that will allow people to search by capturing a video and asking more complex questions about moving objects.

These updates are part of the tech giant's broader efforts to reinvent its flagship search product in the generative AI era and fend off fresh competition from rivals such as Microsoft and OpenAI and upstarts such as Perplexity.

Last week, Microsoft's search engine Bing launched a feature called Bing Generative Search that provides similar AI-powered summaries to consumers. However, it is currently limited to users in the US. OpenAI also announced SearchGPT, its AI-powered search engine prototype in July.

How Search is evolving

Budaraju said that search is not a solved problem, since it is constantly evolving due to technological advancements and changing user expectations. Some 15 percent of the billions of searches done by users on Google on a daily basis are new, never seen before queries, she said.

Not only are queries changing, but the types of things people want to do are also evolving in various ways. AI Overviews is the first step towards "rethinking the whole page in how you can have explorations and discovery customised just for you" she said. Some of the potential examples include planning of meals and trips based on their custom needs.

That said, the launch of AI Overviews in May has raised concerns among web publishers about a potential loss in traffic and revenue. Gartner, a research and consulting firm, predicts traffic to the web from search engines will fall 25 percent by 2026.

In recent months, Google has started featuring links to relevant web pages directly within the text of AI Overviews, making it easier for people to visit websites that interest them.

Budaraju said they are "thoughtful and intentional" to ensure that AI Overviews are helpful to consumers.

"AI Overviews show up on search results pages when we believe that they add additional value to what already exists on the page. We also make sure we have confidence in the quality of the AI overviews" she said.

This additional value may come when the query does not have a single answer. "Maybe it is perspectives, a lot of insights put together or a variety of sources. What it does is a nice framing of all these different perspectives," Budaraju said.

That said, the feature had a rough start when it began rolling out in May, as users encountered many bizarre and erroneous search responses, such as telling users to eat rocks, and put glue on pizza to help cheese stick better, the screenshots of which were widely shared online.

In May, Google stated that it has updated its systems to limit the use of user-generated content in responses that could offer misleading advice and added triggering restrictions for queries where AI Overviews were not proving to be as helpful. The company mentioned that it has also built detection mechanisms for "nonsensical queries" that shouldn’t show an AI Overview, and has also limited the inclusion of satire and humor content.

"The challenges are always there. How should we think about the nuance of a particular query? How should we think about the specific sensitivities that happen to be in that language? Quality is one of the things that we index on very deeply" Budaraju said.

As AI Overviews roll out to more Indian languages, she acknowledged that the challenge becomes harder due to different cultural and linguistic nuances. However, Google plans to address it by leveraging its search engine's ability to understand nuance and different languages, which has been developed over several years.

Google has previously stated its goal to scale up AI Overviews to over a billion people by the end of the year.