Google’s Indian bonanza: Support to 22 Indian languages across products

With an intention to extend the internet for every Indian, Google India has announced that neural machine translation is now available for nine languages

New Delhi: Continuing with its commitment to bring the internet alive for a billion Indians, Google on Tuesday announced a new set of products and features for Indian languages to better serve the needs of Indians who are coming online rapidly and released findings of a joint report by Google and KPMG India titled 'Indian Languages- Defining India's Internet'.

Starting on Tuesday, April 25, 2017, Google Translate will use Google's new Neural Machine Translation technology to translate between English and nine widely used Indian languages -- Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Punjabi, Malayalam and Kannada. Neural translation offers a huge improvement over the old phrase-based system, translating full sentences at a time, instead of pieces of a sentence. This change improves the quality of translation in a single jump than seen in the last 10 years combined.

Google also announced the extension of Neural Machine Translation to Chrome browser's built Auto-Translate functionality to web content, making full-page translations more accurate and easy to read. This will enable Indian language speakers to consume all of the web's content in Indian languages with higher quality translations of everything from songs and lyrics to news articles cricket discussions.

The new translation capability will also be available to users on Google search and Maps to help the discovery of new places with translations of local reviews on Google Maps, both on mobile and desktop. With this update, millions of reviews - from restaurants to cafes or hotels- will appear in the language selected by the user on their device in addition to the original language of review.

Sharing insights from the joint report "Indian Languages- Defining India's Internet by Google and KPMG India, Rajan Anandan, VP, India & South East Asia, Google, said that most important aspect of making the web more useful and meaningful for all of India is to make India's Internet more representative of the India we live in. India today has 234 million Indian language users who're online, compared to 175 Million English web users, we expect another 600 million Indian language users to come online in the next four years. With today's launches, we are taking a huge step forward to being down the barriers that stop Indian language users to get results out of the internet and also help the industry to solve for the needs of billion Indians."

Indian Languages - Defining India's Internet

Methodology used:

The report is compiled by Google and KPMG based on multi-phased research conducted by Nielson covering Indian-language internet users and content generators.

In Phase I: Focused group discussions and interviews (across urban and rural centres) were conducted with NCCS classes A2, A3, B1 and C1, who access internet in Hindi, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi and Tamil. The respondents were in age groups 15 to 21 years 22-30 years and 31-40 years.

In Phase II: Quantitative face to face interviews were conducted among a sample of 7,050 (4,612 urban and 2,448 rural respondents) Indian languages users of Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada and Malayalam. To measure and calibrate different triggers and barriers among Indian language users. Phase III: Close to 60 interviews with respondents across varied stakeholders publishers, content creators and advertisers of different categories such as e-tailing, travels, payments, classifieds, communication device manufacturers and service providers. This was done to understand their motivations, methods and challenges faced while creating and publishing content in Indian languages. The interviews were conducted across Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Bengaluru.

Key Highlights of the Report:

Indian Language User-Internet landscape:

In the last few years, the rapid scale of adoption of internet across the country has set the ball rolling and today Indian Language users have already overtaken the total number of English language users on the Internet in India.

• India today has 234 million language users online, compared to 175 million English users.
• The Indian language user base will continue to grow at 18% annually to reach 534 million in the next four years.
• 9 out of 10 Internet users coming online today will be an Indian language user.
• Adoption of Internet by languages spoken:

Today, Tamil, Hindi, Kannada, Bengali and Marathi speaking users have the highest adoption online services, followed by Telugu, Gujarati and Malayalam.

In the next four years:

• Hindi speaking users alone will overtake English speaking users and will be the most used language on the Internet in India.
• Marathi, Bengali, Tamil and Telugu speaking Internet users will form 30% of the total Indian language user base.

Key categories of Consumption - Indian Language Internet users today

Messaging Entertainment, Social media and Online News are the top four categories that have the highest adoption amongst the language users.

• Messaging- 169 million
• Digital Entertainment- 167 Million
• Social Media- 115 Million
• Online News- 106 Million

Digital Payments, Online Government services, E-tailing and Digital Classified are small today but will see the fastest growth in adoption by language users.

• Digital Payments- 47 million
• Online Government Services- 41 million
• E-tailing- 42 million (only visit not transacting)
• Digital Classified- 24 million

Compounded annual Growth Rates by Categories:

• Messaging- 19 per cent
• Digital Entertainment- 19 per cent
• Social media- 21 per cent
• Online News- 22 per cent
• Digital Payments- 30 per cent
• Online Government Services- 33 per cent
• E-tailing- 32 per cent
• Digital Classified- 32 per cent

Key behavioural aspects of Indian languages internet users:

• 99 per cent of Indian language users access the internet through their mobile devices. The overall share of internet users in India accessing internet through mobile devices is 78 per cent.
• 68 per cent internet users consider local language digital content to be more reliable than English.
• 35 per cent of Indian language internet users access government services, classified news and payments services exclusively online.
• Language enabled pre-loaded applications and web browsers see higher adoption among first time/new Indian language internet users.
• 88 per cent of Indian language internet users are more likely to respond to a digital advertisement in their local language viz a viz English.

Challenges faced by local language users today:

• 60 per cent Indian language internet users stated limited language support and content to be the largest barrier for adoption of online services.
• 80 per cent of Indian language internet users face challenges in using English keyboards.
• 55 per cent of the users find the stated high cost and limited internet access as key barriers for using the internet regularly.

Expected growth by key categories of consumption-Indian language internet users by 2021:

Online News:

Online news will become the 4th largest online category reaching an estimated 280 million users from current 106 million today.

• 32 million Indian language users consume news exclusively on a digital medium today.
• Over 60 per cent of Indian language internet users prefer to consume regional or local news. Companies curating local news in Indian languages will play a larger role.

Government Services:

Online government services will be the fastest growing category amongst the language users and will be used by 172 million users from current user base of 41 million.

• 28% of the Indian language Internet users access Government services online for filing applications, job search, accessing information on Government schemes and tax related services.
• Online Government services will see the highest adoption by Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and Gujarati speaking users online.

eTailing

The e-tailing industry which is currently accessed (not transacting) by 42 million online Indian language Internet users, will see a 3X growth to reach 165 million Indian language users.

• Convenience and Product Range Variety are the key reasons for language users to shop online.

Digital Payments

Total share of Indian language Internet users accessing online payment services is expected to increase from 28% today to 43% (from current 47 million to reach 175 million).

• In digital payments, Hindi today accounts for the 50% of the current Indian language Internet users. Huge potential to grow in other languages.

Digital Classifieds:

Digital classified companies are poised for growth with Indian language focus as 30% of Indian language Internet users access classified services offline and 50% of these users are likely to adopt if provided in their preferred language.

• Total user base will grow from current 24 million to 100 million.
• Jobs, Matrimony and Real Estate will see robust growth.

Digital Advertising:

Digital advertising in local languages is expected to reach an AdEx of $1.5 billion in the next four years.

• The share of digital advertisements in local languages is expected to increase from 5% to about 35% by 2021.

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