Google Cloud is launching an accelerator program for the government-endorsed, Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) aimed at helping India’s digital sellers build and scale their digital commerce operations.
As part of this initiative, the company is open-sourcing a ready implementation of ONDC infrastructure and core application programming interfaces (API) to facilitate scalability and security and enable access to its Retail AI technology and PaLM API. Google Cloud is also introducing a start-up credits program where organisations that enable ONDC are eligible to apply for a $25,000 grant.
The tech major made the announcement at the I/O Connect event in Bengaluru on Wednesday. It also unveiled a slate of AI tools and technologies for India in a bid to help developers. To enable building generative AI applications, Google is making its large language model accessible through PaLM API, MakerSuite, and features on Vertex AI.
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Ambarish Kenghe, Vice President, Product Management, Google, said, “The advent of AI presents significant opportunities for developers to bolster India’s position as a leading global innovation hub. At Google, we continue to make deep investments to support the ecosystem’s growth with a rich set of open and integrated technologies, and we are excited to see more breakthrough solutions this ecosystem will build for India and the world.”
Open-sourcing
Google is also open-sourcing its research models and datasets to help developers build solutions with India-focused speech data and building information. Through its collaboration with Google as part of Project Vaani, the Indian Institute of Science is open-sourcing its first set of speech data comprising over 4,000 hours across 38 languages; Google is also Open Buildings information of over 200 million buildings in the country to enable organizations to plan social and infrastructure projects.
The company said it is open-sourcing the SeeGull Database, a global stereotype benchmark with broad geo-cultural coverage including stereotypes existing within India, to evaluate and mitigate biases in Natural Language Processing. The company will also soon be rolling out a Trusted Tester program for developers to access its healthcare AI model APIs that can identify medicines within handwritten prescriptions.
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In addition, the Google Maps Platform introduced Address Descriptors – an India-first experimental feature available in 25 Indian cities – to make it easier for customers to find and communicate addresses using relevant landmarks and area names.