At Google House in Bangalore, the Mountain View giant is demonstrating how it is optimizing its product portfolio for India. India is a different and exponentially growing market, and thus deserves special attention.
As Sandeep Menon, Google Country Marketing Director explains, ” Indians are coming online from Mobile devices at a very rapid rate – six to seven million new mobile internet users every month. Today’s event is about showcasing how we are working towards making all our products relevant and useful for India, and how smartphones have evolved to become the best personal assistant you have never had. Whether you need directions ten minutes before your next meeting, step by step recipe to make an impression or a way to never be late to airport again, Google can help you connect to people and information you care about.”
Google demonstrated the recently launched Hindi Instant Translate feature in Google Translate, which allows you to do live translation of road signs and other pictorial text to Hindi. The new Google Photos app can backup all photos across all of your devices, and also provides unlimited free storage space.
Voice search in Google App, which now places a permanent search widget on top of your homescreen, has been optimized to work well with India accents. The app also delivers faster and lighter results for those surfing on low speed 2G connections. Google also talked about adding bus and railway transit and other local information for Indian cities to Google Now. Google has also been prodigiously promoting ‘YouTube Offline’ and ‘Maps Offline’ features to compensate for dismal connectivity speeds in India.
We are all in for the direction Google is heading to. We like how Google Now pushes relevant local contextual cards at us and how it can easily recognize our Indian accents every time. The point being, these India specific features are more than simple gimmicks and do add value to user experience.
