What you need to know
- Google has announced a pilot of a Google Assistant-enabled end-to-end vaccine booking feature in India.
- Google has worked closely with COWIN to make the integration possible.
- In addition to English, the feature will work in eight Indian languages.
Google announced a bunch of new initiatives to improve the experience of its Indian users at the seventh edition of Google for India on November 18. Along with new features to help users find high-quality information in their local language, Google has also announced the first Google Assistant-enabled vaccination booking flow.
Google has worked together with COWIN, the Indian government's official web portal for COVID-19 vaccine registrations, to make it easier for people to book an appointment. The company says the feature will empower users with "access to information and healthcare that would otherwise have been out of reach."
Prabhakar Raghavan announced a pilot of the first-ever Google Assistant-enabled, end-to-end vaccine booking flow in India. Set to begin rolling out in early 2022. #GoogleForIndia@WittedNote @mandaviya_in @PMOIndia @MoHFW_INDIA @AyushmanNHA pic.twitter.com/3dbALaaJWCPrabhakar Raghavan announced a pilot of the first-ever Google Assistant-enabled, end-to-end vaccine booking flow in India. Set to begin rolling out in early 2022. #GoogleForIndia@WittedNote @mandaviya_in @PMOIndia @MoHFW_INDIA @AyushmanNHA pic.twitter.com/3dbALaaJWC— Google India (@GoogleIndia) November 18, 2021November 18, 2021
The end-to-end vaccine booking feature is set to become available to users in the country early next year. Once the pilot begins, users will get voice guidance at each step while booking a COVID-19 vaccination appointment on the COWIN portal. It will work in English and eight Indian languages: Hindu, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu.
Local language speakers in India can now access web pages written in other languages in their preferred language, thanks to a new Search feature. The feature is now available to users in Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam. Google has promised that support for more Indian languages will be added soon. The feature can be accessed on any mobile browser.
Google has also announced a few new features that will soon be available to Google Pay users in the country. The app is gaining support for Hinglish, which is basically a conversational hybrid of Hindi and English. Google believes that the addition of Hinglish support will make interactions via Google Pay feel more intuitive and natural.
To make it easier for users to pay contacts, the app will soon gain a speech to text feature. Once it rolls out to the best Android phones, users will be able to use voice input to send money to another user's bank account. Another upcoming feature, called Bill Split, will allow users to split and settle their shared expenses.
