A study by Oxford Economics found that the creator community of Online video sharing and social media platform YouTube contributed Rs 10,000 crore to India’s GDP in 2021. In the same period, it supported over 750,000 full-time jobs.
2021 notched the milestone contribution of Rs 6,800 crore by the Google-owned company’s content creator economy to the country’s GDP 2021. In 2020, it supported the equivalent of 683,900 jobs.
The report, which was launched on Monday at the Google for India event, surveyed 563 YouTube creators of all sizes, 4,021 YouTube users, and 523 businesses across various industries.
“YouTube, in India, is woven into the fabric of our lives. We are delighted that YouTube’s creative ecosystem continues to power India’s creator economy, supporting new jobs and opportunities across the length and breadth of the country,” said Ajay Vidyasagar, Director of South, South East Asia, and APAC Emerging Markets, YouTube.
YouTube and Google disclosed a range of new offerings at the event, with AI and machine learning (AI/ML) being their focal point.
YouTube introduced two new features to broaden learning and healthcare content on its platform, while Google shared its updates on upgrading type, as well as voice search offerings.
YouTube is testing an AI/ML-enabled solution called Aloud, aimed to translate and dub videos in various regional languages at zero additional cost. This feature is currently limited to a small group of healthcare providers.
“We want to help truly democratize important health information. And, we remain committed to working closely with experts in healthcare and investing in technologies that will enable them to create multilingual content efficiently, to reach audiences at scale,” Chatterjee said.
YouTube said it plans to take in healthcare institutions, such as Narayana, Manipal, Medanta, and Shalby, to create health-related credible content across languages like Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati, Bengali, and English.
Additionally, YouTube has introduced ‘Courses’, which allows creators to offer viewers multi-session video tutorials and add supplementary learning tools like PDF files.
YouTube said Courses would be an additional resource to the existing eight monetization methods that content creators already have.
The feature ‘Courses’ will be rolled out in the beta phase in India, South Korea, and the US. YouTube will initially focus on three expanse areas: digital skills (such as coding languages), professional and entrepreneurial skills (how to start a business, how to do an interview well), and personal passions (Photography). It plans to slowly expand these areas after considering the feedback from both creators and viewers.
Starting in 2023, qualified creators in India can offer free or paid Courses to viewers.
Google also launched an array of new features pivotal to AI.
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Improved visual search
Google would work on making visual search seamless so that users can search simultaneously with text and images. The multi-search will be available in different languages from next year.
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Better speech recognition for ‘Hinglish’ language
Google will introduce a better speech recognition model for the Hinglish language, a mix of English and Hindi language, capable of understanding accents and the person’s speaking style.
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More Security Features On Google Pay
Google Pay will raise red flags for suspicious transactions. It will be done by employing deep learning-based advanced algorithms to detect fraud behavior.
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Project Relate
Project Relate is a pilot project catering to people with non-standard speech patterns. This new AI feature will enable people with speech difficulties to interact with Google Assistant more easily.
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AI/ML in health
With the help of AI and machine learning technology, Google will help people simplify and understand handwritten prescriptions by Doctors. The company has also partnered with Apollo on a project using AI to check an x-ray for tuberculosis.