In today’s fourth annual Google for India event held at New Delhi, Google announced its all-new AI-powered website reading feature for its Google Go search app to increase its appeal across India with her wide range of languages. Google Go is getting two brand new features: A bilingual news feed and audio playback of chosen articles. The latter feature supports multiple languages, including Hindi, English, Marathi, and Malayalam, supporting a total of 28 languages.
Google launched Google Go in 2017 “as a lightweight, faster way to search the web on devices which may have less space or less reliable internet connections. Today, millions of people around the world use Google Go to learn, stay informed, and explore the web more easily than ever before.” In 2018, Google launched the Google Go read the web feature “this technology can read aloud billions of web pages in 28 languages smoothly, and in a natural sounding voice, even on 2G connections. It also uses minimal cellular data. This technology relies on Artificial Intelligence to determine which parts of a page to read, and which to leave out, so you only listen to what is important.”
According to Google, the web reading feature can make website reading just like watching TV or listening to the radio. The feature reads out text in one of 28 supported languages whilst highlighting each word on the page as it goes. Google announced that this feature would save much time and help with multitasking and even in learning new languages. It would certainly be very helpful to people with visual and reading impairments. It enhances access to the “richness of the web.”
It has been said that the new Google Go text-to-speech feature was inspired by user research in India, where the majority emphasized the importance of an effortless understanding of information. The company stated,” Especially for people coming online for the first time, consuming long-form text on a small device can be difficult and time-consuming. With this new feature, you can just press play and follow along.”
Google plans to extend the web-reading feature to more Google products in the future.
