‘Working with Jio to build affordable smartphone’

Chief executive officer of Google Sundar Pichai on Thursday said the company continues to engage closely with partner Jio on the initiative of building an affordable smartphone and that work is underway on the project. Last year, Google had picked up a 7.7% stake in Jio Platforms for ₹33,737 crore. It had also entered into a commercial agreement with Jio Platforms to jointly develop an entry-level, affordable smartphone.

“We are focused on building an affordable phone... we are committed to making progress on the project and we are working with them (Jio),” Pichai said in a virtual conference with select reporters from Asia Pacific. He, however, did not divulge other details, including the launch date and pricing.

Availability of affordable devices, along with cheap data rates can help bring the internet within reach for more people across the country.

Talking about the impact of Covid-19 on these projects, Pichai said the pandemic has highlighted the importance technology plays in people’s lives.

“...We realise the importance technology plays, and be it building products like Google Meets or working to make sure all of this works well on their (telecom operators’) networks, and bringing more affordable access to smartphones and computing, it’s just deepened our efforts there,” he said. He also talked about some of the announcements made earlier this month at its flagship event.

Talking about ethical use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in technology, Pichai said it is still early days and that the company is approaching the subject by being transparent, sharing and publishing research, and highlighting AI principles among other ways.

“Over time, we’ll have to figure out responsible AI regulations, which promotes innovation, but balances it with responsible oversight...we should never lose sight of the benefits AI is going to bring, just like technology has always brought tremendous benefits and work hard to address the downsides and mitigate it, I think that’s a construct all of us have to do globally,” he said.

Pichai added that Google intends to be a “responsible partner” and thought leader in this area. “We are all investing in privacy preserving, I think we need to improve practices across the industry, and we are working to do that on the web and mobile. We need to meet user expectations,” he said.

Pichai noted that there is premium content and free content which is ad supported, and that both are available to users. NEW DELHI: