On Wednesday, Manish Gupta, Senior Director for India and APAC at Google DeepMind, announced that Google would be collaborating with BharatGen at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay to develop indigenous Indic language, automatic speech recognition, and text-to-speech models. Addressing a gathering at Google I/O Connect India 2025 in Bengaluru, where Google unveiled new initiatives and AI capabilities for the Indian developer and startup ecosystem, Gupta spoke about India's successful use of AI capabilities to create real-world applications benefiting millions of businesses and people both in India and globally.
He also stated that Google had partnered with local communities to apply research from Google DeepMind to build impactful solutions for India in areas such as energy, medicine, and material science. As an example, he mentioned that 1.5 lakh researchers across India were using AlphaFold to address complex human challenges, ranging from autoimmune diseases to cancer.
Google AI Pro Plan for students
Gupta further reiterated Google's recent announcement that the subscription for the Google AI Pro Plan would be offered to students across India for free for a year. He noted that the company’s Gemma models were also contributing to India’s AI ambitions, citing that Sarvam, Soket AI, and Gnani, chosen by the India AI Mission, were developing the next generation of Make in India AI models based on Gemma. He added that Google had been closely collaborating with Sarvam, which developed the recently released Sarvam-Translate model for long-form text translation using Gemma.
During the event, Google also announced the expansion of fresh and accurate information in Google Maps, covering over 250 million places worldwide, to enable developers to build better generative AI features.
Google stated that Indians represent the second-largest number of active developers on Google Play globally, contributing over 10 lakh developer jobs in 2024. To support these developers, Google launched 'Google Play x Unity Game Developer Training,' a free, immersive, and globally-recognized training and certification program for aspiring and professional game developers in India. Google also revealed plans to host the Gen AI Exchange Hackathon, which will allow developers to apply their industry-leading AI knowledge and skills to practical use, fostering innovation and solution building.
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