To enable Indian population to use the internet and content in their own language, the search giant today made significant announcements today at an event in New Delhi. The first announcement was about the creation of the Indian Language Internet Alliance (ILIA), a group committed to promoting the growth of Indic-language content online.
According to Google, there are 200 million internet users as of today and 5 million internet users are being added to this list. Google is quite optimistice that by the year 2017, there will be 500 million internet users in India. Currently, India is the third largest internet market in the world and in another 12 months, it will surpass the penetaration of US, the way India is adopting internet usuage.
Through its efforts, the ILIA hopes to enable 300 million Indian language speakers to become highly engaged Internet users by 2017. According to Google, the ILIA is composed of ABP News, Amar Ujala Publications Ltd, C-DAC, DB Digital, Firstouch, HinKhoj, Jagran Prakashan Limited, LinguaNext Technologies Pvt. Ltd, NDTV, Network 18, Oneindia.com, Patrika Group, Process Nine Technologies Pvt Ltd, Prost Innovation Pvt Ltd, Reverie Language Technologies Private Limited, Times Internet Limited, Ver Se Innovation/NewsHunt, Webdunia.com in addition to Google. The Alliance will work together to accelerate building Indic language content for the hundreds of millions of Indians who will be coming online for the very first time, mostly via smartphones and mobile devices.
In addition to empowering more Indian language users to come online with the ILIA, Google is committed to building the Indian language web by making products for Indic language speakers. Today, Google also showcased demos of Voice Search in Hindi and has also launched a website called www.hindiweb.com, which will be a good place for Hindi speaking Internet users to discover the best Hindi content across websites, apps, videos and blogs. Google also showcased the HIndi Keyboard for mobile devices.
Google has started the initiative with HIndi language so that more and more Indians could be comfortable to use internet and search the content in their loacal language. In due course of time, Google will extend these services to other Indian lnaguages and in the next 18 months, the users in India will be able to use the Google services in almost all the Indian languages.
Speaking at the event, Amit Singhal, Google’s Senior Vice President of Search, said, “Our mission at Google is to ensure the world’s information is universally accessible, and this includes the millions of users in India who are about to come online for the first time. Hindi Voice Search will be just one of the many steps Google is taking to empower the Indian language users and advertisers to take advantage of the Web’s huge economic and social potential.”
According to Google India, English-speaking Indian population of 198 million is already online. The remaining 90% of Indians who are not online tend not to be English speakers and this initiative to provide the services in their local langauge would be a boon for them
With the spread of smartphones, Indian language Internet users have started to come online rapidly on their smartphones. They are using Indian language keyboards to access and create content in their language. This initiative of ILIA hopes to enable more creators to build much more content in Indian languages, so that more Indian users will be able to use the Web and find it relevant to their everyday live.
On this occasion, Prakash Javadekar, Minister of Information and Broadcasting, also spoke about the importance of providing internet and content in the local languages and appreciated the initiative of Google, which will help India becoming fully digital. According to the Minister, the internet usuage will go up significatntly if the same is available in Indian languages.
“Google is very committed to bringing new Internet users online in India,” said Rajan Anandan, Vice President and Managing Director of Google India. “The Web holds great potential to empower many Indians economically and socially, and thanks to the smartphone revolution, many millions of Indians will be coming online for the first time in the next few years. Through the Indian Language Internet Alliance, we want to help content creators to act now and build relevant content for these new Indian language mobile users.”
