A new artificial intelligence (AI) tool to improve farming methods in India has been unveiled by Google: the Agricultural Landscape Understanding (ALU) Research API. Google VP Jeanine Banks announced the Google I/O Connect event in Bengaluru.
ALU Research API aims to increase agricultural output, facilitate access to financing, and broaden agricultural product markets. To investigate its potential applications, Google is teaming up with organisations such as Ninjacart, Skymet, Team-Up, IIT Bombay, and the Indian government.
The ALU tool provides precise landscape insights at the farm level, which are critical for agricultural transformation. When it comes to drought preparedness, irrigation concerns, and market access, the API may use high-resolution satellite images and machine learning to demarcate field borders.
Google is also making strides in the Indian language market. Developers now have access to 14,000 hours of speech data in 58 languages as the Google DeepMind team expands Project Vaani. They made the CALM framework available to the public and launched IndicGenBench to test language models on 29 Indic languages; this gave programmers a chance to address the linguistic variety in India.
Google has also cut API service prices on the Maps platform by up to 70% to support Indian developers, aiming to maintain its competitive edge against platforms like Ola Maps.
