Google pilots Assistant-enabled, end-to-end vaccine booking flow in India

With an increasing number of Indians using voice assistants, Google has piloted Google Assistant-enabled, end-to-end vaccine booking flow. The feature is designed to guide users through the process of booking a vaccination appointment on the COWIN website with voice guidance in English and eight Indian languages.

Google claims to have worked closely with COWIN to enable this integration, where even a relatively new internet user will now be able to easily book a vaccine appointment. The feature will be available in Chrome on Android.

Announced during the 7th edition of Google for India, the company’s blog post explains, "filling a web form may sound trivial to most, but for millions who are unfamiliar with using a smartphone or who are unable to read, it can be daunting. Over the last few years, we’ve strived to reduce such complexity and remove barriers to information, especially with innovations in speech recognition and language understanding. India continues to be a global leader in the adoption of these technologies – in fact, the number of Indians using voice queries daily is nearly twice the global average."

This feature will work in English and eight Indian languages including Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu, and will begin rolling out in early 2022. Google plans to further scale this technology to other services on the web, to help make it simpler for people to get this done on the internet.

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Also Read: Google announces first-ever Google Assistant enabled, end-to-end vaccination booking flow in India