Tag Archives: India

AdSense now understands Marathi

Today, we’re excited to announce the addition of Marathi, a language spoken by over 80 millions people in Maharashtra, India and many other countries around the world, to the family of AdSense supported languages.


The interest for Marathi language content has been growing steadily over the last few years. With this launch, AdSense provides an easy way for publishers to monetize the content they create in Marathi, and advertisers can connect to a Marathi speaking audience with relevant ads.


To start monetizing your Marathi content website with Google AdSense:

  1. Check the AdSense Program policies and make sure your site is compliant.
  2. Sign up for an AdSense account
  3. Add the AdSense code to start displaying relevant ads to your users.

Welcome to AdSense! Sign Up now!

Posted by AdSense Internationalization Team

Keeping privacy and security simple, for you

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Our goal has always been to create products that are simple, helpful, and intuitive. It’s no different with privacy and security: managing your data should be just as easy as making a restaurant reservation, or using Maps to find the fastest way back home.

Earlier this year, we started rolling out more ways for you to protect your data, including making our controls easier to access, new ways to use Google apps with Incognito mode, and options to automatically delete data like your Location History, searches, and other activity with Google.

Making these controls consistent across our core products will help them become more familiar, and we hope, even easier to use. Today, we’re sharing a few more updates on our progress toward this goal.

Incognito mode arrives in Maps


Incognito mode has been one of our most popular privacy controls since it launched with Chrome in 2008. We added it to YouTube earlier this year, and now we’re rolling it out in Google Maps.

Incognito mode in Maps

When you turn on Incognito mode in Maps, your Maps activity on that device, like the places you search for, won’t be saved to your Google Account and won’t be used to personalize your Maps experience. You can easily turn on Incognito mode by selecting it from the menu that appears when you tap your profile photo, and you can turn it off at any time to return to a personalized experience with restaurant recommendations, information about your commute, and other features tailored to you. Incognito mode will start rolling out on Android this month, with iOS coming soon.

Expanding Auto-delete to YouTube


In May, we announced that you could automatically delete your Location History and Web & App Activity, which includes things you've searched and browsed. We promised to bring this to more products, and now we're bringing Auto-delete to YouTube History. Set the time period to keep your data—3 months, 18 months, or until you delete it, just like Location History and Web & App Activity—and we’ll take care of the rest.
Auto-delete in YouTube History


Control your privacy with your voice in the Assistant


We’re adding new ways to easily understand and manage your data in the Assistant.
First, when you ask questions like “Hey Google, how do you keep my data safe?” the Assistant will share information about how we keep your data private and secure.
We’re also making it easier to control your privacy with simple voice commands. In the coming weeks, you’ll be able to delete Assistant activity from your Google Account just by saying things like “Hey Google, delete the last thing I said to you” or “Hey Google, delete everything I said to you last week.” You won't need to turn on any of these features—they will work automatically when you ask the Assistant for help. If you ask to delete more than a week's worth of data from your account, the Assistant will point you directly to the page in your account settings to complete the deletion. We’re rolling this out in English next week, and in all other languages next month.
Privacy actions in the Assistant

Strengthening your password security


Protecting your privacy online requires strong security, and that’s why we protect your data with one of the world’s most advanced security infrastructures.
Tools like our Security Checkup help users by automatically detecting potential security issues with your Google Account and make it easy for you to add extra protections to keep your account safe, like removing old devices or unused apps that still have access to your account.
But we also want to help protect you across the internet, and a big part of that is helping you remember passwords for your other online accounts. With so many accounts, bad habits like using the same password across multiple services are common, and make all of your accounts as vulnerable as the weakest link. If someone steals your password once, then they could access your information across different services using that same password. 
Our password manager automatically protects your passwords across your different accounts, and today, in time for Cybersecurity Awareness Month, we’re making it much more powerful. We’re introducing the Password Checkup, a new feature that—with one click—tells you if any of your passwords are weak, whether you’ve reused them across multiple sites, or if we've discovered they've been compromised (for example, in a third-party data breach). Find more about the Password Checkup in this post.
Password Checkup
We’re constantly working to improve the products that billions of people use, right now. We’re also looking to the future so that teams at Google, and other organizations, can build new products and develop new engineering techniques, with privacy and security as core principles. In May, we opened the new Google Safety Engineering Center where we expect the number of privacy engineers to double by the end of 2019. We’ve also open-sourced technologies like our differential privacy library, Private Join and Compute and Tensorflow Federated. These will help any institution—from hospitals to governments to nonprofits—find better ways to gain insights from their data while protecting people's privacy.
As technology evolves, so do people's expectations for security and privacy. We look forward to building protections that aim to exceed those expectations, and will continue sharing regular updates about this work.


Posted by Eric Miraglia, Director of Product Management, Privacy and Data Protection Office


Adding 57,000 public toilets to Google Maps across India

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In 2016, in collaboration with the Swachh Bharat Mission, Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs, we embarked on a campaign to help users across India to locate public toilets within Google Maps. We launched this as a pilot in three cities: New Delhi, Bhopal, and Indore. After almost three years, this effort now encompasses over 57,000 public toilets in 2,300+ cities across the nation.




With Google Maps, our aim has always been to help people as they navigate and explore the world, wherever they are. And we believe that making information about public sanitation facilities easily accessible to people is a key element for social good -- one that also constitutes the cornerstone of the government's Swachh Bharat campaign to promote clean habits and hygiene.


We have a long history of making Google Maps more relevant, accurate, and reliable for Indian users with India-first solutions such as two-wheeler mode and offline Maps. For this campaign, our product and engineering teams together built a new process seamlessly integrate toilet listings into Google Maps. We have worked closely with the Ministry to update Maps with key information about public toilets from across India, while refining our systems to accurately surface these toilets through a variety of user queries -- over 2.5 lakh users now search for public toilets every month across Search and Maps.


Today, all you need is to search for ‘public toilets near me’ on Google Search, the Google Assistant or Google Maps and receive results at your fingertips. 


In addition, through Google My Business, we helped the Ministry take ownership of these listings on Google Maps so they could monitor visits, ratings, reviews and more, thereby gaining valuable insights that could help them take necessary action to maintain and upgrade toilets. 


Google Maps Local Guides are also continuing to feedback on toilets in their locality, late last year we ran a campaign to spur awareness and adoption that resulted in 32,000 reviews, photos and edits being added to public toilets across India.


We have been humbled to be a part of this campaign, and remain committed to finding ways to make Google Maps even more useful and relevant to users across India. 


Posted by Anal Ghosh, Sr. Program Manager, Google Maps

Launching Build for Digital India: Student Developers Solve For India Initiative






India is one of the largest and fastest-growing markets for digital consumers, with 460 million internet subscribers in 2019, second only to China. Newly digitising sectors, including agriculture, education, energy, financial services, healthcare could each create $10 billion to $150 billion of incremental economic value in 2025 & possibly create 60 million to 65 million jobs, as per McKinsey

The Government of India’s ‘Digital India’ vision seeks to empower every citizen with the benefits of technology. Google India is committed to contributing to this vision through fostering innovation in areas that are core to  India’s challenges.

To ensure that India achieves its digital potential, Google and the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) have come together to launch Build for Digital India - Student Developers Solve for India program. The aim of this initiative is to give Indian science, technology and engineering students a platform to become solution creators for the problems they see around them and their communities. Students will be invited to build solutions on any of the following themes:

  1. Healthcare
  2. Agriculture
  3. Education
  4. Smart Cities & Infrastructure
  5. Mobility & Transportation
  6. Women Safety
  7. Digital India
  8. Environment & Sustainable Development Goals
  9. Accessibility & Disability
  10. Digital Literacy
  11. Others

We will support and nurture tech ideas and/or market ready tech products by providing:

  • Learning opportunities: numerous online learning opportunities on cutting edge tech like machine learning, Android, Google Cloud, progressive web apps and more through courses, live sessions, talks, etc.
  • Mentorship: mentorship sessions in product design, strategy, tech and more from Google and industry experts across India to the most promising products and prototypes. 
  • Showcase: the program will provide visibility and exposure to the best solutions

In order to maximise the reach of the initiative, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) will:


  • Encourage universities and colleges across India to participate
  • Provide infrastructure support
  • Offer guidance and support for each theme

Through this program, Google hopes to further contribute to the tech ecosystem by

  • Upskilling students on key technologies and concepts like cloud computing, machine learning, Android, progressive web apps, Flutter and open source development.
  • Nurturing entrepreneurship among students and motivating them to pick meaningful areas  to apply their innovative tech solutions
  • Building key employability-focussed skills via various focused learning opportunities

Know more and register here

Posted by Paul Ravindranath, Program Manager, Google India Developer Relations

Growing, supporting, and empowering YouTube’s growing army of women creators; bringing APAC’s first ever #WomenToWatch workshop to India

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This week will mark our first ever #WomenToWatch workshop in APAC, and we are thrilled to kick this off right here in India. #WomenToWatch is one of the three NextUp special editions, we are hosting in the country and is focussed on helping women creators grow on YouTube.  


With over 265 million monthly active users, India has become our biggest and fastest growing market globally. There is no better time than now to be a YouTube creator in India! When we met Archy J, India’s first female bagpiper, during our NextUp camp in 2017, her YouTube channel, The Snake Charmer had about 24K subscribers. While she had a unique talent, and created amazing bagpipe metal covers for songs like Coldplay's Hymn for the Weekend, theme songs for the Game Of Thrones and The Walking Dead, the reach and engagement on her channel was still small. Through her NextUp journey, she learnt more about community engagement and storytelling  and now has over 430K subscribers and over 63 million views on her videos. 


Archy is not alone! It’s incredible to note that back in 2015 there were no women creators to have crossed the one million subs mark, but today, there are over 120 women creators to have crossed that threshold. The growth of our women creators has been inspiring, and we are committed to supporting them on this journey. 
YouTube NextUp 2019 Batch 


We have been investing in growing YouTube’s vibrant community of women creators. Global icons like Liza Koshy, Lilly Singh and Indian sensations including Prajakta Koli, Nisha Madhulika, Prajakta Kohli, Sejal Kumar, Rickshawali have had a stellar journey on YouTube. That’s not all, there are hundreds of women who have been a part of our YouTube  NextUps, Creator Camps, FanFest and Pop-Ups and have built a career on the platform. 


These women, and thousands of others are breaking barriers, taking to unconventional verticals like MotoVlogging, Technology, Gaming, Travel, Farming, Education, Sewing & Embroidery, and creating diverse content in multiple Indian languages including Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam, among others. They are coming from all parts of the country and are doing all sorts of amazing things! What’s interesting to note, is that many women Bollywood celebrities like Alia Bhatt and Jacqueline Fernandez, and sportswomen like Snehal Pradhan are also joining the bandwagon.   


This year, along with our #WomenToWatch NextUp winners, there will be over 700 creators at our YouTube Pop-Up Space in New Delhi who will get to connect with top creators, mentors and leading industry leaders. Through their shared stories and experiences, we hope to see a room full of inspiration! 


Moreover, the YouTube Pop-Up Space has gone bigger and better -- travelling to three cities Indian cities [Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai]. The YouTube Pop-Up at Aloft, Aerocity, New Delhi will have three mega sets -- studio style, pop chic, and an outdoor flea market. Creators will get free access to the state-of-the-art production equipment and themed production sets, to produce original and innovative high production quality content for their own YouTube channels.  
YouTube Pop-Up Space in Delhi


Over the course of next five days, the first class of NextUp #WomenToWatch and budding creators who join us at the YouTube Pop-Up in Delhi, will be able attend events and workshops that will help them improve their presence on YouTube and to collaborate or network with others creators and industry professionals. 

By Satya Raghavan, Director - Content Partnerships YouTube in India and Marc Lefkowitz, Head of YouTube Creator & Artist Development, APAC

More options to help websites preview their content on Google Search


Google uses content previews, including text snippets and other media, to help people decide whether a result is relevant to their query. The type of preview shown depends on many factors, including the type of content a person is looking for and the kind of device they're viewing it on. 

For instance, if you look for recipe results on Google, you may see thumbnail images and user ratings--things that may be more helpful than text snippets when it comes to deciding what you want to eat. Alternately, or perhaps you're looking for a concert nearby, and are able to check out the events directly in the search results. These are made possible by publishers marking up their pages with structured data.

Google automatically generates previews in a way intended to help a user understand why the results shown are relevant to their search and why the user would want to visit the linked pages. However, we recognize that site owners may wish to independently adjust the extent of their preview content in search results. To make it easier for individual websites to define how much or which text should be available for snippeting and the extent to which other media should be included in their previews, we're now introducing several new settings for webmasters. 


Letting Google know about your snippet and content preview preferences


Previously, it was only possible to allow a textual snippet or to not allow one. We're now introducing a set of methods that allow more fine-grained configuration of the preview content shown for your pages. This is done through two types of new settings: a set of robots meta tags and an HTML attribute. 


Using robots meta tags


The robots meta tag is added to an HTML page's , or specified via the x-robots-tag HTTP header. The robots meta tags addressing the preview content for a page are:


  • "nosnippet" - This is an existing option to specify that you don't want any textual snippet shown for this page.
  • "max-snippet:[number]" - New! Specify a maximum text-length, in characters, of a snippet for your page.
  • "max-video-preview:[number]" - New! Specify a maximum duration in seconds of an animated video preview
  • "max-image-preview:[setting]" - New! Specify a maximum size of image preview to be shown for images on this page, using either "none", "standard", or "large".

They can be combined, for example:
Preview settings from these meta tags will become effective in mid-to-late October 2019 and may take about a week for the global rollout to complete.


Using the new data-nosnippet HTML attribute


A new way to help limit which part of a page is eligible to be shown as a snippet is the "data-nosnippet" HTML attribute onspan”,”div”, and ”section“ elements. With this, you can prevent that part of an HTML page from being shown within the textual snippet on the page.

The ”data-nosnippet“ HTML attribute will start affecting presentation on Google products later this year. Learn more in our developer documentation for the robots meta tag, x-robots-tag, and data-nosnippet.


A note about rich results and featured snippets


Content in structured data is eligible for display as rich results in search. These kinds of results do not conform to limits declared in the above meta robots settings, but rather, can be addressed with much greater specificity by limiting or modifying the content provided in the structured data itself. For example, if a recipe is included in structured data, the contents of that structured data may be presented in a recipe carousel in the search results. Similarly, if an event is marked up with structured data, it may be presented as such in the search results. To limit that presentation, a publisher can limit the amount and type of content in the structured data. 

Some special features on Search depend on the availability of preview content, so limiting your previews may prevent your content from appearing in these areas. Featured snippets, for example, requires a certain minimum number of characters to be displayed. This can vary by language, which is why there is no exact max-snippets length we can provide to ensure appearing in this feature. Those who do not wish to have content appear as featured snippets can experiment with lower max-snippet lengths. Those who want a guaranteed way to opt-out of featured snippets should use nosnippet.


The AMP Format


The AMP format comes with certain benefits, including eligibility for more prominent presentation of thumbnail images in search results and in the Google Discover feed. These characteristics have been shown to drive more traffic to publishers’ articles. However, publishers who do not want Google to use larger thumbnail images when their AMP pages are presented in search and Discover can use the above meta robots settings to specify max-image-preview ofstandardornone.”

These new options are available to content owners worldwide and will operate the same for results we display globally. We hope they make it easier for you to optimize the value you get from Search and achieve your business goals. For more information, check out our developer documentation on meta tags. Should you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us, or drop by our webmaster help forums

Posted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Switzerland

Powering the digital economy; building a helpful Google for everyone in India

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Rama Devi has taught more than a thousand women how to use the internet in her role as a Saathi—now she’s helping farmers become more productive. Amita Raghu has used digital tools to grow Krishne Tassels, her traditional saree tassel business, and trained 700 women in the art of tassel-making. Rajesh Jain, winner of Google’s AI Impact Challenge, has created an app that helps cotton farmers identify pests just by snapping a photo.


They are among the 460 million Indians who are using the internet to search, create, solve problems, build businesses—and help others. They show how technology isn’t just driving economic growth in India, but creating a ripple effect of opportunity across communities. 


Continuing that momentum was the focus of this year’s Google for India event, where we shared announcements aimed at making the internet more accessible, inclusive and empowering for Indians.   


Expanding access in rural India


Four years ago, we launched Google Station: a partnership with Railtel and Indian Railways to bring fast, reliable and secure WiFi to 400 train stations. We hit that milestone last May, and we’ve also expanded the program beyond train stations to include thousands of public buildings and spaces around the country.  And today we’re announcing the next step: a partnership with BSNL to bring high-speed public WiFi to villages in Gujarat, Bihar and Maharashtra —places that haven’t had a WiFi connection before. 


We’re also launching an initiative to help the hundreds of millions of Indians who use 2G phones get the information they need, without requiring data or an internet connection. The Vodafone-Idea Phone Line—supported by the Google Assistant—enables Vodafone-Idea users to call a single number free of charge (000 800 9191000), at any time, and ask for everything -- from sports scores, traffic conditions and weather forecasts or get help with homework.   Starting today, we’re delighted to be expanding the service to all English- and Hindi-speaking Vodafone-Idea customers across India.


Speaking India’s language(s) 


As we improve access to the internet, we also need to make it relevant and helpful, with information Indians need in the languages they speak.  


For many Indians, voice is increasingly becoming their preferred way to search. Two years ago we introduced the Google Assistant, and have since expanded it to nine Indian languages. Hindi is now the second-most used Assistant language globally (after English). And :


We’re also adding more Indian languages to other Google products.  


We’re expanding Discover, the news feed app we launched at Google for India last year, with Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Kannada, Malayalam. Oriya, Urdu and Punjabi will follow soon. 


In Google Lens--which allows people to search for information, ask questions and translate text by pointing their phone’s camera at things they’re interested in--we’re now adding Tamil, Telugu and Marathi.

Last year we launched Bolo, a speech-based app that helps children learn how to read -- today we’re adding Bangla, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu to it, and expanding our content pool by partnering with publishers like Chotta Bheem and Katha Kids.  Bolo has already helped 800,000 young Indians read stories more than three million times and speak half a billion words. We are working with partners like Saajha, the Kaivalya Education Foundation, Pratham Education Foundation and Room to Read-- and looking forward to making it available to even more Indian families. 


Together with the introduction of interpreter mode in the Assistant on Android and Android Go phones in the coming months, which will help translate from one language to another, we’re confident that these initiatives will help unlock more relevant information and content for even more users across India.  


Building platforms for economic opportunity


The biggest story in India’s booming internet economy has been the rise of digital payments.  BHIM UPI has transformed how India makes payments. From 17 million payments in August 2017, to crossing 900 million payments last month, India is setting the global standard on how to digitise payments. 


We launched Google Pay to support this growth, giving Indians a simple, safe and reliable way of making and receiving payments. In the last 12 months alone, we’ve grown more than three times to 67 million monthly active users, driving transactions worth over $110Bn on an annualized basis, with hundreds of thousands of offline and online merchants. But we think there’s an even bigger role for Google Pay to support businesses.  


Starting  today, we’re introducing the Spot Platform which enables merchants to create branded commercial experiences that bridge the offline and online worlds.  Popular services like UrbanClap, Goibibo, MakeMyTrip, RedBus, Eat.Fit and Oven Story are already on board through our early access program.  
We’re excited to see how other organizations use Spot to create new experiences, reach new customers and make life easier and more convenient for the Indians who rely on them.   


Spot is one of a number of new Google Pay initiatives we’re announcing today.  We’re also making payments available to debit and credit card holders through ‘tokenized’ cards--a secure way of paying for things using a digital token on your phone rather than your actual card number.  Tokenized cards on Google Pay will be rolling out in the next few weeks with Visa cards for HDFC, Axis, Kotak and Standard Chartered banks. And we will roll out support to cover Mastercard and Rupay and more banks in the coming months.


We’re also deepening our support for small businesses through a new app called Google Pay for Business: a free and easy way for small and medium-sized merchants to enable digital payments without the hassle of time-consuming onboarding and verification process.  
The reality is that despite the massive growth of digital payments, the vast majority of India’s over 60 million small businesses are still not benefiting from the growing digital economy.  We hope these initiatives will help merchants adopt digital payments with more confidence and help contribute to the long term growth of online financial services for the benefit of every Indian.  


A new Jobs effort:


Enabling economic opportunities for every Indian also means helping people prepare for jobs and connecting them with the right opportunities. Today, we are excited to announce a new Jobs effort focusing on entry-level jobs, that are not easily discoverable online. Jobs will be available as a Spot on Google Pay to help job seekers find and prepare for entry-level positions that fit their needs. It uses machine learning to recommend jobs and training content to help these users prepare for interviews and learn new skills. Jobs also makes it easy for them to apply, schedule interviews and engage directly with potential employers.
We’re partnering with the National Skills Development Corporation for their Skill India program.  As part of this collaboration, Skill India students will be offered a seamless way to get started with Jobs and find better employment.  We’re introducing Job Spot with 24 early partners in retail like 24Seven and Healthkart, delivery and logistics partners like Swiggy, Zomato and Dunzo and hospitality providers like Fabhotels. We will be expanding this to more sectors and partners in the coming weeks.


We’re incredibly inspired by India.  With its world class engineering talent, strong computer science programs and entrepreneurial drive, India has the potential to contribute to advancements in AI and its application to tackle big challenges. We want to support and contribute to this with Google Research Indiaan AI lab we’re starting in Bangalore. The team will focus on two pillars: first, advancing fundamental computer science and AI research by building a strong team and partnering with the research community across the country. Second, applying this research to tackle big problems in fields like healthcare, agriculture, and education while also using it to make apps and services used by billions of people, more helpful. 


From digital skills training to investing in AI research—we’re looking forward to continuing to contribute to India’s extraordinary progress and growth.  

By Caesar Sengupta, Vice-President, Next Billion Users Initiative and Payments 

Launching the Spot Platform powered by Google Pay

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Enables merchants to create branded commercial experiences that bridge the offline and online worlds.


We launched Google Pay two years ago with the mission of making payments Simple, Secure and universally Accessible for every Indian - whether it’s a tenant paying rent to their landlord or a brother buying gold for his sister on Raksha Bandhan or an entrepreneur selling locally. Google Pay with its conversational UI and machine-learning based fraud protection made it easier and safer for individuals and businesses to connect. Today, there are millions of people who use Google Pay for their daily needs. 
Google Pay’s conversational UI makes it easy                     Fraud detection keeps it safe

But we’re just getting started. One area we have been focusing on is enabling businesses to grow. Say, someone like Parul who owns a chain of sweet shops in Delhi. Parul has a business website but would love to both sell her sweets beyond her neighbourhood and deepen her relationship with her existing walk-in customers. Her customers keep forgetting that she has a website, and building an app which customers would download and keep on their phones, is hard. This challenge isn’t unique to Parul’s business, think of an electronics chain that wants to let you know that the latest phone you’ve been waiting for is back in stock, or an online travel service that wants to send you the itinerary of an upcoming trip. Each of them want to build customized and branded experiences, where customers can discover, buy and engage directly with a business without having to install an app, create new accounts or share payment details with every business they use. 

That’s why, today, we’re launching the Spot Platform powered by Google Pay that enables merchants to create branded commercial experiences that bridge the offline and online worlds. 

A Spot is a digital front for a business that is created, branded and hosted by them, and powered by Google Pay. Users can discover a Spot online or at a physical location, and transact with the merchant easily and securely within the Google Pay app. The Google Pay app also surfaces the relevant Spot to the user when they need it, directly on the homescreen. This means that someone’s favourite restaurant Spot might show up around lunchtime, or the cab booking Spot might show up before your morning commute. Users can also easily share a Spot on the Google Pay app or on their favorite messaging app.
Search, select, pay and track your order right within Google Pay

Offline-Online and everything in between
But, what is unique to the Spot Platform is how it brings the online to the physical world. Businesses with a physical presence can place a ‘Spot Code’ at specific locations. Customers can scan this Spot Code or tap (for NFC enabled phones) on it to go straight into the business’s Spot on Google Pay. This works because Spot Codes are a combination of a custom visual code and an NFC tag. Just scan or tap and you’re in the Spot. Yep, it’s that simple! 
Discover Google Pay Spot Codes offline to be taken online

Quick, easy, light. Made with love for HTML and Javascript
A Spot is built using HTML & Javascript so developers can leverage their existing investments into mobile websites or progressive web apps (PWA) and transform it into a Spot,  by just adding a few lines of Javascript. This makes it possible for a merchant to have a truly scalable solution while keeping their digital experience consistent.

Enabling connections, not just transactions
We understand that discovery is where it starts, but building deep connections is what matters the most - a connection that doesn’t just end with a payment, but extends to effective post sale engagement. The Spot Platform helps merchants own this relationship by providing a conversational framework, so that order updates, offers, and recommendations can easily be surfaced to the customer. This is powered by our Order API which is specialised to provide real time tracking for delivery orders, and the Messaging API which can surface relevant messages post checkout to the user. 

Primitives done right
The Spot Platform provides APIs for things like identity and payment management that have been developed based on user and partner feedback and learnings from the last two years of developing Google Pay in India (originally called Tez). They provide frictionless UX for key actions like sign in, payments and sharing. For the merchant, this makes the development process faster, and helps reduce customer dropoff at these critical moments, leading to higher conversion. 

We respect privacy
Privacy and security are core to the Spot Platform. No device permissions or data provided by the user to Google Pay is passed on without explicit user consent to the merchant Spot. Users can grant, review or modify these permissions at any time, for each Spot individually.  

We’re thrilled about all the new possibilities the Spot Platform brings for both individuals and businesses. Many of our users have already experienced the underlying technology when they bought Train Tickets or Gold on Google Pay or played the Tez Shots game we built for the Cricket World Cup. The Spot Platform has been rolled out to all Google Pay users, and some of our early access partners who have created a ‘Spot’ include:
Today, we are broadening this early access program, and inviting developers and businesses to sign up to create their Spot and build engaging relationships with millions of users on Google Pay. Start here

By Ambarish Kenghe, Director, Product Management, Google Pay

Google Research India: an AI lab in Bangalore

People have been using technology to solve problems and improve their quality of life for centuries, from sharing knowledge with the printing press to going online to build a small business. These days, artificial intelligence is opening up the next phase of technological advances. And with its world-class engineering talent, strong computer science programs and entrepreneurial drive, India has the potential to lead the way in using AI to tackle big challenges. In fact, there are already many examples of this happening in India today: from detecting diabetic eye disease to improving flood forecasting and teaching kids to read


To take this to the next level we created Google Research India––an AI lab we’re starting in Bangalore. This team will focus on two pillars: First, advancing fundamental computer science and AI research by building a strong team and partnering with the research community across the country. Second, applying this research to tackle big problems in fields like healthcare, agriculture, and education while also using it to make apps and services used by billions of people more helpful. 


Google Research India will be led by Manish Gupta, a renowned computer scientist and ACM Fellow with a background in deep learning across video analysis and education, compilers and computer systems. We’re also excited to have Professor Milind Tambe join us on a joint appointment from Harvard University as Director of AI for Social Good. Professor Tambe will build a research program around applying AI to tackle big problems in areas like healthcare, agriculture, or education. 


The lab in Bangalore will be part of and support Google’s global network of researchers: participating in conferences, publishing research in scientific papers, and collaborating closely with each other. We’re also exploring the potential for partnering with India’s scientific research community and academic institutions to help train top talent and support collaborative programs, tools and resources. 


Starting Google Research India is an important step for us, and for me personally, too. As someone who grew up in India, studied at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, and learned so much from the community there, I’m grateful that we now have the opportunity to help advance research and play a part in building the AI community in India. 

If you’re a scientist or researcher interested in learning more about Google Research India, click here.     

By Jay Yagnik, Vice President and Google Fellow, Google AI

A more accessible internet for Indians

Rama Devi has taught more than a thousand women how to use the internet in her role as a saathi—now she’s helping farmers become more productive. Amita Raghu has used digital tools to grow Krishne Tassels, her traditional saree tassel business, and trained 700 women in the art of tassel-making. Rajesh Jain, winner of Google’s AI Impact Challenge, has created an app that helps cotton farmers identify pests just by snapping a photo.


These are some of the more than 460 million Indians using the internet to search, create, solve problems, build businesses—and help others. They show how technology isn’t just driving economic growth in India, but creating a ripple effect of opportunity across communities. 


Continuing that momentum was the focus of this year’s Google for India event, where we shared announcements aimed at making the internet more accessible, inclusive and empowering for Indians.   


Expanding reliable Wi-Fi in India


Four years ago, we launched Google Station: a partnership with Railtel and Indian Railways to bring fast, reliable and secure WiFi to 400 train stations. We hit that milestone last May, and we’ve also expanded the program beyond train stations to include thousands of public buildings and spaces around the country.  Today we announced the next step: a partnership with BSNL to bring high-speed public WiFi to villages in Gujarat, Bihar and Maharashtra—places that haven’t had a WiFi connection before. 


We also announced an initiative to help the hundreds of millions of Indians who use 2G phones get the information they need, without requiring data or an internet connection. The Vodafone-Idea Phone Line—supported by the Google Assistant—enables Vodafone-Idea users to call a single number (000 0800 9191000) free of charge at any time, and ask for everything from sports scores, traffic conditions and weather forecasts to help with homework. The service will be available across India in English and Hindi.


Speaking India’s languages


As we improve access to the internet, we also need to make it relevant and helpful, with information Indians need in the languages they speak.  


For many Indians, searching by voice rather than text is their first choice. Two years ago, we introduced voice search in nine Indian languages on Google Assistant.  Hindi is now the second-most used Assistant language globally after English. And from today, you can simply say, "Hey Google, talk to me in Hindi” (or the Indian language of your choice) to start using the Assistant, without needing to dig around in settings.


We’re also adding more Indian languages to the Google apps Indians use, including Discover, Lens and Bolo (an AI-powered teaching app that’s already helped 700,000 young Indians learn to read).   


Lens


Building platforms for economic opportunity

One of the biggest factors in India’s booming internet economy has been the rise of digital payments—from 17 million transactions in August 2017 to more than 900 million last month.

We launched Google Pay to support this growth, giving Indians a fast, safe and reliable way of making and receiving payments.  It’s now used by millions of people to complete transactions with hundreds of thousands of offline and online merchants. But we think there’s an even bigger role for Google Pay as a tool to support small businesses. 

Starting today, we’re introducing the Spot platform: a way for businesses to create experiences and engage their customers within the Google Pay app.  Popular services like UrbanClap, Goibibo, MakeMyTrip, RedBus, Eat.Fit and Oven Story are already on board through our early access program, and we’re excited to see how other organizations use Spot to make life easier and more convenient for the Indians who rely on them. 

We’re deepening our support for small businesses through a new app called Google Pay for Business: a free and easy way for small merchants and storefronts to enable digital payments without the hassle of time-consuming verification process.  And we’re stepping up our support for job seekers too - introducing a Spot on Google Pay to help people find entry level positions that aren’t always easily discoverable online. We’ll be partnering with the National Skill Development Corporation to make sure Skill India students can take advantage of it. 

Spot on Google Pay

Merchants can use Spot on Google Pay to provide a better customer experience. 

These are just some of our efforts to help more Indians share in the benefits of the internet economy, and we’re looking forward to continuing to contribute to India’s extraordinary progress and growth.