New Delhi: Google has announced the creation of Indian Language Internet Alliance (ILIA), in partnership with leading Indian technology and content companies, to promote Indic-language content on the internet. The search giant also announced the launch of the Hindi voice search in the country.
Google hopes to enable 300 million Indian language speakers to become highly engaged Internet users by 2017.
To support its effort in showcasing Indian language content on the web, Google announced the launch of www.hindiweb.com, which it says would enable Hindi speaking Internet users to discover the best Hindi content across websites, apps, videos and blogs.
Google says there are 200 million internet users in India, and practically all of the India'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.
Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar inaugurated the initiative and expressed confidence that this can change the technology landscape of the country. “We are very adaptive and have accepted new technology and techniques, be it in the farm or our workplace. It just has to be easy,” he said.
The company also launched a new Hindi keyboard as well as a bunch of open source fonts in the Language.
