Google today announced the creation of the Indian Language Internet Alliance (ILIA), a group committed to promote the growth of Indic-language content online, at an event in India. Google hopes to enable 300 million Indian language speakers to become highly engaged Intern users by 2017. Google already rolled out the Hindi language Voice Search in India few months back and today it is officially launched in the country & also demoed it at the event. Google Search lets users enable voice search in five languages, out of more than 50 supported languages and dialect.
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.”
Rajan Anandan, Vice President and Managing Director of Google India, said,
“Google is very committed to bringing new Internet users online in 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.”
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 ILIA will work together to accelrate 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. Google is also committed to building the Indian language web by making products for India language speakers.
Currently there are over 200 million Internet users in India, the country’s English-speaking population is already online and the remaining 90% Indians who are not online are not English speakers. The ILIA aims to bring more content in Indian languages. Since these users use Indian language keyboards to access and create content content in their language. Google also launched a website called hindiweb.com that enables users discover Hindi language content.