Google to Collaborate with IIT Bombay’s BharatGen to Build Indigenous Indic Language Model

Google will be collaborating with BharatGen at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay to develop indigenous Indic language, automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech models, Manish Gupta, Senior Director for India and APAC at Google DeepMind said on Wednesday.

Gupta was addressing a gathering at Google I/O Connect India 2025 held in Bengaluru where the IT giant announced new initiatives and AI capabilities to support the Indian developer and startup ecosystem.

“India’s success story using AI capabilities to build real world applications that are reaching millions of businesses and people across India and the world,” he said.

According to him, Google has also partnered with local communities to apply the research done at Google DeepMind to build impactful solutions for India across energy, medicine and material science.

“For instance, 1.5 lakh researchers across India are using AlphaFold to help solve some of humanity’s most complex challenges, from autoimmune diseases to cancer,” he added.

He also reiterated the recent announcement of Google, that the subscription for Google AI Pro Plan will be offered to students across India for free for a year.

Gupta said the company’s Gemma models are also contributing to India’s AI ambition.

“Sarvam, Soket AI and Gnani, which have been selected by the India AI Mission, are building the next generation of Make in India AI models based on Gemma,” he added.

According to him, Google has been closely collaborating with Sarvam, which built the recently-released Sarvam-Translate model for long-form text translation using Gemma.

During the event, Google also announced that it is expanding the availability of fresh and accurate information in Google Maps comprising over 250 million places worldwide, enabling developers to build better generative AI features.

Indians, according to Google, are the second largest number of active developers on Google Play across the world, contributing over 10 lakh developer jobs in 2024. Targeting them, Google launched ‘Google Play x Unity Game Developer Training’, a free, immersive, and globally-recognised training and certification program for aspiring and professional game developers in India.

Google also announced that it will be hosting the Gen AI Exchange Hackathon, which will enable developers to apply their industry-leading AI knowledge and skills to practical use, to innovate, and build solutions.