Google’s Indian-born CEO Sundar Pichai is in India. This is his first visit to India after taking the top executive position in October this year.
On day one of his visit he addressed the media to talk about Google’s plans to make India a better-connected country.
In his address he promised that Google will be able to provide free Wi-Fi services at 100 railway stations in India by the end of 2016. The pilot project to make railway stations wi-fi enabled will start with Mumbai Central station from January 2016.
The telecom wing of the Indian Railways, RailTel, recently signed an agreement with the subsidiary of Google India to provide Wi-Fi facilities at 400 stations across the country.
Google has been working on connecting rural India for a while now and Pichai reiterated his company’s committment to the effort.
Google to help women from 3,00,000 villages across India get online in 3 years.Sundar Pichai
Pichai ended his media address by saying that, “This country (India) has given me and Google so much.”
Google plans to make better its search engine in the country by enabling the use of Indian languages. To improve searches in different languages Google partnered with LAVA and Intex to put Indic keyboards on their devices. The Indic keyboard by Google now supports 11 Indian languages.
To help overcome network issues, Google will make it’s services seamless on 2G networks in India. The company has also come out with seamless solutions for areas with unstable networks, like offline GoogleMaps. Improving GoogleMaps and maiking it more localised is an aim for 2016.
In addition, Google will also provide real-time scores and video highlights, custom-made for the cricket crazy nation.
Despite a digital India boom, the company believes that India is still a big market with millions of users yet to touch a smartphone and on join the internet wave.
Google also made announcements on how YouTube will also get a Pause-buffer feature on mobile this year, which will also let users know how much data is consumed via this feature.
The company also reiterated its confidence in Project Loon, that delivers free Wi-Fi to inaccessible areas.
After his keynote address to the Indian media Pichai will be meeting Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Communications Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.
On December 17, Pichai will meet Prime Minister Narender Modi, after which he will attend a chat session with students of Shri Ram College of Commerce. In the evening, he will attend a banquet hosted by the president.
During his last visit to India in September 2014, Sundar Pichai had launched AndroidOne that was unable to deliver on it’s promise. Google has also rolled out a free OS update of the latest Android Marshmallow on AndroidOne smartphones.
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