DuckDuckGo would not let users face pop-up ads from Google and more: Report

Reportedly, users will not witness the misleading pop-ups from apps like Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Brave and more on DuckDuckGo. The company has taken the action to provide a clean and secured experience to its users.

The report also suggests that this update will soon be available in iOS, Android, Chrome, Firefox and Edge extensions.

Meanwhile, Google India has teamed up with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) for the Project Vaani initiative that would gather speech data across India and use it to create an artificial intelligence (AI)-based language model that can understand diverse Indian languages and dialects.

The project is part of Bengaluru-based IISc and AI and Robotics Technology Park’s (Artpark) Bhasha AI project that includes SYSPIN (Synthesizing Speech in Indian languages) and RESPIN (Recognizing Speech in Indian languages).

“India’s spoken languages change every few kilometres…machines have no hope. So, research and innovation for inclusive language AI require capturing this diversity in our datasets,” Prasanta Kumar Ghosh, a professor at IISc, who leads these initiatives, said, explaining the reasons for launching Project Vaani.

Google and IISc plan to collect speech samples from 773 districts. The initiative, currently focused in 80 districts across 10 states, is expected to expand to every district over the next couple of years and boost the size and diversity of India’s open-sourced language data, with over 150,000 hours of curated speech and 100 million sentences of text in Indian scripts. Artpark and IISc simultaneously plan to launch challenges for researchers and startups to build applications in areas such as health, agriculture, and financial inclusion using these datasets.

Manish Gupta, director of Google Research India, said Vaani would be trained on speech and text data from over 100 Indian languages. He said the new model is a leap over Multilingual Representations for Indian Languages (MuRIL), which was a text-only model. The new model supports both speech and text.