The new features were announced in a blog post for a Google for India event, during which Google also revealed the use of machine learning to detect fraudulent transactions on Google Pay. The new system will analyse the aggregate transaction patterns of millions of users and will be able to highlight any activities that it deems suspicious.
Users will receive flashing warnings whenever they’re about to make a payment to a flagged contact, and in some cases, the app might even cause the device to vibrate in order to make sure that the user is paying attention. Google also released a feature that will help users keep track of their transaction history by asking questions about their spending. For instance, users can ask Google how much money they spent on items such as coffee.
The blog post also highlights India’s unique approach to embracing digital technology and how this can have a transformative effect on society. Google touched on its commitment to finding ways to help more people share the benefits of using the internet in their daily lives.
Google also introduced more natural and intuitive ways for people to search by leveraging new advancements in artificial intelligence. As people in India are increasingly seeking out information on the web in their own language, voice search and visual searches using smartphone cameras are becoming more popular. According to Google, the percentage of Indians using voice search queries each day is near twice the global average.
Google has launched a new speech recognition model that can more effectively understand people who speak in Hinglish. The system relies on a new, neural-network inspired speech recognition model that analyses the individual’s accents, surrounding sounds, context, and speaking styles.
For Google Lens, Google has introduced multisearch, which now allows users to search for information using images and text simultaneously. Multisearch is available in English in India and will support other languages in the next year, starting with Hindi.
In November 2022, Google has introduced UPI Autopay as a payment option on Play Store to enable its India-based users to purchase subscriptions using UPI.
The UPI functionality update responds to user demand for this payment option in the region, where Unified Payments Interface, known commonly as UPI, has become the most popular payment route when it comes to P2P and merchant payments. As such, users in India have been enabled to make subscription-based purchases using UPI via Google Play.
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