Google Unveils Key Initiatives To Boost India's AI Capabilities At I/O Connect 2025
'Indian developers are literally writing the next chapter of India's success story, using AI capabilities to build real-world applications that are reaching millions of businesses and people across India and the world,' said Manish Gupta, Senior Director for India and APAC at Google DeepMind.
The company also emphasised its continued commitment to India's developer ecosystem, revealing that the Play and Android platforms contributed ₹4 lakh crore in revenue and generated 35 lakh jobs in 2024. Google further introduced agentic AI tools and optimised templates in Firebase Studio, allowing developers to build and deploy full-stack AI applications more quickly and efficiently.
In a major move for mobile commerce, Google announced expanded access to over 250 million mapped places globally and launched India-specific pricing for Google Maps UI components. Additionally, AI-powered summaries in the Places API will help developers create location-based services tailored specifically for Indian users.
To further India's AI ambitions, Google is collaborating with three India AI Mission startups—Sarvam, Soket AI, and Gnani—on Make-in-India AI models based on Gemma. Sarvam's recent model, 'Sarvam-Translate,' exemplifies this homegrown innovation. In partnership with IIT Bombay's BharatGen, Google is also advancing ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) and TTS (Text-to-Speech) models for Indic languages.
To support India's thriving game development community, Google launched the 'Google Play x Unity Game Developer Training' program, in collaboration with Unity and GDAI. Targeted at 500 Indian developers initially, the program offers over 30 hours of specialised training across various game development roles.
Highlighting grassroots innovation, the Gen AI Exchange Hackathon encouraged developers to apply their AI skills to real-world challenges. During the event, startups such as Sarvam, InVideo, Glance, and Nykaa showcased impactful solutions built using Google's AI models.
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