New Delhi: India-born Sundar Pichai, in his first trip to the country after becoming the Google CEO, discussed several points in his keynote address at the Google for India event held here on Wednesday.
Pichai focused on the current and future project plans in collaboration with India, which included Project Loon, which is starting next year to bring the rural areas under internet coverage. He also spoke about Google's focus on offline technologies using smartphones.
The following are the key announcements from the Google for India event which shows the company's plans for India:
- Pichai predicted that India will have more android users than the US by 2016.
- The new virtual keyboard on Android will support 11 Indian languages.
To rev up its presence in the engineering and business sector in the country, Google will set up a campus in Hyderabad. Bangalore and Hyderabad will soon see campus recruitments to this end.
- Over the next three years, Google will be training two million android developers via 30 universities in India, and the National Skill Development Corporation.
- In a move towards making the entire nation internet-enabled, Google has promised to provide wi-fi to 100 railway stations over the country by the end of 2016, with help from Indian Railways and RailTel. Mumbai Central station will get wi-fi access by January, next year.
The Asus Chromebit stick PC, a candy bar-like device which can turn any monitor into a computer, will be launched in January 2016 with the Chrome OS, at prices starting from Rs 7,999.
- Google introduced Accelerated Mobile Pages— a new feature which will improve page loading speed.
- A "lighter" version of Search results was introduced, which will load faster and increase traffic for publishers.
Google will bring out the Tap to Translate feature in 2016, which instantly translates a highlighted word without having to change apps to find the translated meaning. A demonstration for the same was also carried out using the camera lens.