Google Assistant[1], which was launched for the Reliance Jio Phone[2] feature phone in December 2017, has seen a six-fold growth in its usage, the company has announced.
In a move to empower feature phone users in the country, Google[3] on December 5, announced to bring Assistant to Reliance Jio Phone.
This was the first time that Google Assistant was made available in any feature phone.
"Since we launched the Google Assistant on the first feature phone in December, the Reliance Jio Phone, usage of the Assistant in India has grown six times over the past four weeks," Caesar Sengupta, Vice President, Next Billion Users Team at Google, said in a blog post[4].
With Google Assistant, the next billion users are fast adopting cutting-edge technology "astonishingly quickly".
"This isn't just due to many semi-literate or illiterate users, but also the fact that typing is difficult for people who never grew up with a computer keyboard," he mentioned.
There are estimates that Web content is more than 50 percent English. Hindi, the fourth language in terms of global speakers, is not even in the top 30 languages for Web content.
"In countries like India, the generation coming online now is more comfortable in their native language than in English, and so language can be a big blocker to expanding Internet access," he said.
Going forward, Google believes the demand for local content will reverse the language imbalance, leading to an Internet more inclusive of the entire world's language diversity.
According to Sengupta, the next billion users will be the first to truly embrace ubiquitous computing, expecting apps to work in a natural way rather than having to learn all the...