Google Cloud banking on AI, machine learning to compete with Amazon, Microsoft in India

IT giant Google, which was a late entrant into India's fast-growing cloud services market, is looking at its machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) prowess to win customers and compete with rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

The internet major has vast amounts of user data, which it has gathered from its popular services such as Android, Google Search, Gmail and YouTube. It is now trying to sell its service by using tools, it claims is specifically tuned for Indian users.

One of tools is Hike Messenger, among the largest consumer internet services in the country with over 100 million users it got as a customer from rival AWS. The move was completed in 60 days with zero downtime, which was not a small feat for a service that sees upward of a billion messages being sent on a daily basis.

"When they started talking to us, it was on the promise of our machine learning and AI. They saw Google to be the most innovative provider, who was really bringing cutting-edge technology. They have already started getting machine learning benefits such as text to speech," said Mohit Pande, country manager for Google Cloud, www.afaqs.com reported.

Hike also factored in cost-effective offerings in machine learning-based services such as sticker recommendations for messaging, he added.

''We believe that the India cloud centre will spur a whole of economic activity across a lot of startups, partner organisations,'' said Mohit Pande, country manager, India, Google Cloud. Pande was speaking to media on the sidelines of the Google Cloud Summit.