Google Launches Navlekha For Indian Publishers To Scale On Online Presence

As part of its long term focus in India, technology giant Google has announced the launch of a new platform for publishers in Indian languages to go online. Titled Navlekha, the project aims to use artificial intelligence (AI) and scan offline documents with higher accuracy and take them online.

Google plans to start Navlekha with Hindi before expanding to other languages. The announcement was made at its Google for India event in New Delhi held today (28 August) where Google also announced the rebranding of its popular Tez payments app to Google Pay.

According to a blog post by Google, 90 per cent of Indian publishers lack an online presence.

Google is also adding more languages for its search function (English and Hindi) and its Assistant app (Marathi). It has also announced that it is working on seven other Indian languages.

Publishers on Navlekha will be given a free domain and hosting along with an option to generate revenue using its AdSense platform.

Another application, Google Go was launched which allows users to have a page read to them in 28 Ianguages including major Indian ones such as Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and Bengali.