Sundar Pichai: Google Products Helpful For The Moments That Matter

By focusing on its "timeless mission" of organizing the world's information and making it universally useful and accessible, Google has made products that are helpful in moments of crisis, such as during floods in India.

“I’m excited to show you how we’re driving that mission forward in 2 key ways: by deepening our understanding of information so that we can turn it into knowledge; and advancing the state of computing, so that knowledge is easier to access, no matter who or where you are,” he said in his keynote at the opening of Google I/O Developers Conference on May 11.

Pichai further added, “throughout the pandemic, Google has focused on delivering reliable information to help people stay healthy.”

“Over the last year, people used Google Search and Maps to find where they could get a Covid vaccine nearly 2 billion times,” he said. Google has also expanded its flood forecasting technology to help people stay safe in the face of natural disasters.

“During last year’s monsoon season, our flood alerts notified more than 23 million people in India and Bangladesh,” said Pichai.

Google Maps CEO Sundar Pichai said, "We've also doubled the number of buildings mapped this year in India and Indonesia."

“Around the world, we’ve mapped around 1.6 billion buildings and over 60 million km of roads to date", “Using advances in 3D mapping and ML, we’re fusing billions of aerial and street level images to create a new, high-fidelity representation of a place.

“Pichai also announced that Google was adding 24 new languages to Google Translate, including the first indigenous languages of the Americas.