Google on Monday announced to create an Indian Language Internet Allowance (ILIA) with an aim to make internet accessible to 300 million Non-English speaking users. ILIA will be a new platform to offer better content and technology to Hindi speaking population of the country, in addition to that Google will also launch a Hindi voice search in the country.
As per Mr. Rajan Anandan, Managing Director, Google India,’With most of the 200 million-odd English speakers already online, the growth of Internet in India will depend on lowering the entry barriers for the rest of the population.’ Most of the 5 million Internet users being added everyday are on the mobile and not all of them speak English. Another barrier being the lack of Hindi content in the country, there were just 22,000 Wikipedia entries in the language while 400 million people spoke the language.
The new Alliance will accelerate building Indian language content for the hundreds of millions of first-time web users in India. Google voice search now understands and gives results in Hindi, that will make life more simple for the users. Mr. Amit Singhal, Senior Vice President, Google India, said it will benefit people like his mother who understand English but would be more comfortable using their native tongue. “Google is not a company that caters only to the English-speaking crowd. We are truly a global company and feel a sense of responsibility to every Internet user in the world,” added Mr. Singhal, the person behind rewriting most of Google’s search algorithm.
To the launch was also present Minister for Information and Broadcasting, Mr. Prakash Javadekar, who was confident on this change which as per him will bring the technology landscape of the country. “ We are very adaptive and have accepted new technology and techniques, be it in the farm or our workplace. It just has to be easy,” he added.