Google unveils major AI initiatives for India, localising Gemini and boosting developer ecosystem

During the event, the key announcement was the localisation of onshore processing for Gemini 2.5 Flash, bringing faster, low-latency AI performance for Indian developers, especially in regulated sectors such as healthcare, finance, and governance.

"Indian developers are literally writing the next chapter of India's success story, using AI capabilities to build real-world applications that are reaching millions of businesses and people across India and the world," said Manish Gupta, Senior Director for India and APAC at Google DeepMind.

The company also emphasised its commitment to India's developer ecosystem, revealing that the Play and Android platforms contributed Rs 4 lakh crore in revenue and generated 35 lakh jobs in 2024. Google also introduced agentic AI tools and optimised templates in Firebase Studio, enabling developers to build and deploy full-stack AI apps with greater speed and efficiency.

In a significant move for mobile commerce, Google announced expanded access to over 250 million mapped places globally and launched India-specific pricing for Google Maps UI components. AI-powered summaries in the Places API will help developers create location-based services tailored to Indian users.

Furthering India's AI ambition, Google is collaborating with three India AI Mission startups--Sarvam, Soket AI, and Gnani--on Make-in-India AI models based on Gemma. Sarvam's recent "Sarvam-Translate" model exemplifies this innovation. In partnership with IIT Bombay's BharatGen, Google is also advancing ASR and TTS models for Indic languages.

To support India's vast game development community, Google launched the 'Google Play x Unity Game Developer Training' program, in collaboration with Unity and GDAI. Targeted at 500 Indian developers initially, the program offers over 30 hours of specialised training across game development roles.

Highlighting innovation, the Gen AI Exchange Hackathon encourages developers to apply AI skills to real-world challenges. During the event, startups such as Sarvam, InVideo, Glance, and Nykaa showcased impactful solutions built using Google's AI models. (ANI)