[News] Google expands languages push to serve non-English speakers in India

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There are more than 600 million internet users in India, but only a fraction of this po[CENSORED]tion is fluent in English. Most online services and much of the content on the web currently, however, are available exclusively in English.

This language barrier continues to contribute to a digital divide in the world’s second-largest internet market that has limited hundreds of millions of users’ rendition of the world wide web to a select few websites and services.

So it comes as no surprise that American tech giants, which are counting on emerging markets such as India to continue their growth, are increasingly attempting to make the web and their services accessible to more people.

Case in point: A feature that Google  provides to quickly translate the content of a web page from English to Indian languages has been used more than 17 billion times by users in India in the past year.

Google, which has so far led this effort, on Thursday unveiled some of its new efforts. The company — which counts India as its biggest market by users, and this year committed to invest more than $10 billion in the country over the coming years — said it plans to invest more in machine learning and AI efforts at Google’s research center in India and make its AI models accessible to everyone across the ecosystem. The company also plans to partner with local startups that are serving users in local languages, and “drastically” improve the experience of Google products and services for Indian language users.