Key Takeaways of the ‘Google For India’ Event, 2018

Google, in its ‘Google For India’ event held in New Delhi on 28th August, announced a series of new features and tools launch designed specifically around the need of the Indian users.

While these offerings mainly revolved around making Google suite more regional, the majority of the changes were around Android Go and the OS’s different apps.

Before we move on to looking into what those ‘Google for India 2018’ announcements were, let us quickly glance through the Android Go domain.

What is Android Go?

Announced in Google I/O 2017 and launched in December 2017, Google Go is the tech giant’s flagship venture to enter the developing nations with dwindling internet connection and a smartphone market that is dominated by low memory space devices.

The idea of Android Go was incepted soon after the brand realized that the developing nations like Indonesia, India, and Africa, constitute the majority of the less tapped user base.

For a demographics that suffer from the low internet connection and even lower memory space on their smartphones, Android Go with its half the space size as Android Nougat has come as a respite.

One of the biggest offering of the Android Go is the slimmed down version of its service suite – Google Go, Maps Go, YouTube Go, Gmail Go, Files Go, etc.

[To know more about Android Go, read our descriptive article explaining the concept of Android Go and what makes it different from the regular Android]

Ever since their launch, all the Go platforms have been seeing a very high acceptance rate from the users who were always in a need for apps that would take minimal space on the devices.

And to continue offering the millions of Android users something to gush over and get excited about, a number of advancements are being made continuously in the individual apps.

Let us look at the Google Go related announcements that were made in the Google for India event 2018, yesterday.

What is New in the Go World?

Google Go Search App Can Now Read Website Content

The tech giant said that it will use Artificial Intelligence Technology to find out the most important element of the web page and will then play it back to the site visitor in a language of their choice.

For this purpose, Google has even added over 28 Indian regional languages in its database that are most commonly used across the nation.

Using the technology, it will become a lot easier for the users to consume long form text, while they are occupied with other tasks like driving, cooking, or exercising.

Google Maps Go is Set to be Introduced with New Features

Google Maps Go will soon offer their users navigation in two languages – Hindi and English. In addition to that, Maps Go would continue guiding the users in public transportation along with assisting them with information on which bus stop they should get down at, how much more they will have to walk to reach their destination, etc.

Google Assistant Go Will Become Regional

Google Assistant is all set to be integrated with the local apps like Airtel, Hello English, and Where Is My Train, to offer added functionalities like giving train schedules, plan expiry data, etc.

The digital personal assistant will also support the Marathi language now, in addition to Hindi and English. In addition to these three languages, seven more languages will be added shortly.  

Besides these Go specific announcements, Google also renamed its UPI based payment app from Tez to Google Pay and shared its plans to make the app accessible at more platforms, both online and in-store.

Seeing the growing focus of Google aiming to make its service suite more India centric, it can be assumed that India has captured the Tech and Search Engine giant attention to such an extent that we should now expect a greater level of regional innovations.