Google India on Monday announced the creation of the Indian Language Internet Alliance (ILIA), a group committed to promoting the growth of Indic language content online.
The alliance would work together in building Indic language content for hundreds of millions of Indians who will be coming online for the very first time, mostly via smartphones and mobile devices, Google said here.
Through its efforts, the ILIA hopes to enable 300 million Indian language speakers to become highly engaged Internet users by 2017.
Currently, there are over 200 million Internet users in India, about 16 per cent of its population of 1.2 billion, it 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," Amit Singhal, Google’s Senior Vice President of Search, said
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, he said.
Practically all of the country’s English-speaking population of 198 million is already online. The remaining 90 per cent of Indians, who are not online, tend not to be English speakers.
“Google is very committed to bringing new Internet users online in India,” Rajan Anandan, Vice President and Managing Director, Google India, said.
“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," he said.
The ILIA is composed of ABP News, Amar Ujala Publications Ltd, C-DAC, DB Digital, Firstouch, HinKhoj, Jagran Prakashan Ltd, LinguaNext Technologies Pvt. Ltd, NDTV, Network 18, Oneindia.com, Patrika Group, Process Nine Technologies Pvt Ltd, Prost Innovation Pvt Ltd, Reverie Language Technologies Pvt Ltd, Times Internet Ltd, Ver Se Innovation/NewsHunt, and Webdunia.com in addition to Google.