Google expands languages push in India to serve non-English speakers
By Manish Singh
There are over 600 million internet users in India, but only a fraction of this population is fluent in English. Most online services and much of the content on the web currently, however, are available exclusively in English.
This language barrier continues to contribute to a digital divide in the world’s second largest internet market that has limited hundreds of millions of users’ rendition of the world wide web to a select few websites and services.
So it comes as no surprise that American tech giants, which are counting on emerging markets such as India to continue their growth. are increasingly attempting to make the web and their services accessible to more people.
Case in point: A feature that Google provides to quickly translate the content of a web page from English to Indian languages has been used more than 17 billion times by users in India in the past year.
Google, which has so far led this effort, on Thursday unveiled some of its new efforts. The company — which counts India as its biggest market by users, and this year committed to invest more than $10 billion in the country over the coming years — said …read more
Source: Tech Crunch
