Google Cloud is introducing an accelerator programme for the government-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) to assist digital merchants in building and scaling their online businesses.

The company is open-sourcing ONDC architecture and APIs to improve scalability and security. Google announced a startup credits programme at a developer conference in Bengaluru, with firms that use ONDC eligible to apply for a $25,000 incentive.

Building generative AI applications

Google researchers want to assist all developers in capitalizing on today's new era of generative AI to create great products and experiences. Developers in India may now use PaLM API and MakerSuite, an easy-to-use tool that allows them to develop and prototype prompts straight in the browser, to gain access to our cutting-edge large language model, which also powers Bard. PaLM API is also available through Firebase Extensions, allowing developers to include a chat interface for continuous dialogue, text summarization, and other features.

Google Cloud's Vertex AI also supports generative AI, allowing developers to construct and power unique enterprise-ready generative AI applications. Developers may now use our text model powered by PaLM 2, the Embeddings API for text, and other foundation models in Model Garden, as well as employ user-friendly tools in Generative AI Studio for model customization and deployment, thanks to this release.

Vertex AI models

The researchers revealed three new Vertex AI models, including Codey for code completion and generation, which can be trained on your codebase to help you build applications quickly. Imagen produces, modifies, and customizes pictures from text inputs using Chirp, a universal speech model that enables voice-to-text accuracy for over 300 languages. They also provide Security AI Workbench, an industry-first extensible platform powered by Sec-PaLM, a specialized, big security language model trained on PaLM2 and fine-tuned for security use cases. The new tool aids in the scaling of cybersecurity teams by describing threat actors' attack paths, generating case investigation reports, and monitoring digital threats to save you from becoming the next victim.

Accelerator and startup credits program

The researchers launched an ONDC (Open Network for Digital Commerce) accelerator programme to provide firms with the tools and resources they need to build and scale their digital commerce operations. Google Cloud is making available a ready-to-use implementation of ONDC infrastructure and core APIs. This approach facilitates scalability and security, allowing them to focus on network-critical tasks. Businesses will also gain access to our Retail AI technology, which will assist in improving network search experiences, and our PaLM API, which will use generative AI to improve the quality and descriptions of catalogues.

Open-access research models and datasets

Last year, researchers launched Project Vaani with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) to collect anonymized voice data from 773 districts. IISc is open-sourcing these diverse, high-quality datasets as part of its first milestone. Developers may now access over 4,000 hours of speech data collected from 10K+ speakers in 80 districts across 38 languages and utilize these datasets to build their technology and applications that reflect how local languages are spoken.

Conclusion

The Google researchers are open-sourcing their Open Buildings datasets in India, which are based on satellite images and identify the locations and contours of the country's roughly 200 million buildings. Each recognized structure has a Plus Code, an open-source system that assigns each place a unique address. The researchers expect this to help developers, authorities, and relief organizations expedite their work in urban planning and humanitarian response areas, environmental and climatic science, essential services such as health and education, and more.

Last year, the researchers unveiled the development of a cutting-edge AI and machine learning model that can recognize and highlight medications within handwritten prescriptions. Developers will be able to show their interest in using the Research API soon by applying to the Trusted Tester programme for Private Preview.

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