Google uses India to test ‘deliver to the house near the post office’ feature
- Reference: 1688016491
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/06/29/google_india_address_descriptors/
- Source link:
In Google's [1]outline of this "address descriptors" feature, product managers Malvi Hemani and Pinkesh Patel explain "People in India are used to communicating their addresses relative to a landmark or an area name."
Delivery riders and ride-share operators are therefore often told to deliver to a building next to a post office or pick someone up opposite a college.
India bans open source messaging apps for security reasons. FOSS community says good luck [2]READ MORE
The same is of course true for anyone who lives in an area that is not well signposted. If you've ever had to explain to a driver how to bring you your pizza when they can't see your house number, you understand. No, I do not live in a fire station – there's a house next to the fire station, see it? Don't get us started.
"Through our conversations with developers in India, we've learned that they often try to mirror this way of communicating addresses by building a landmark field into the address form," wrote Hemani and Patel.
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Google's therefore built that into its address descriptors service, which "shows the most relevant landmarks and area names relative to an address [using] a combination of machine learning signals on proximity, prominence, and visibility." Real-world research was also used to identify and rank relevant landmarks and area names relative to an address.
[4]
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Address descriptors is currently an experiment being run in 25 Indian cities. Google's not indicated if it will ever reach other nations (please please please), but in case you're curious it's published [6]documentation that reveals it's based on reverse geocoding lookups.
The service was announced on Wednesday at I/O Connect – a Google gabfest for developers. The event also featured news that Google has open sourced [7]SeeGull – a database of offensive stereotypes, so you can exclude them from natural language processing models. SeeGull contains stereotypes about identity groups spanning 178 countries across eight different geopolitical regions and six continents. It also includes "state-level identities within the US and India."
[8]Micron, Applied Materials make big investments in India
[9]India official fined after draining reservoir to recover phone
[10]India calls for all mobile phones to include FM radios
[11]Google IO: A deeper dive into the developer day's details
Another announcement at the conference saw Google launch an accelerator for India's Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) – a service that federates e-commerce operations into a single platform, so that buyers can choose from multiple suppliers instead of shopping within a walled garden.
India's government created ONDC to prevent development of entrenched e-tail monopolies.
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Google Cloud has open sourced an implementation of ONDC infrastructure and core APIs, plus some "Retail AI technology that will help enhance search experiences on the network." It's offering grants to organizations to help them participate in ONDC.
This has obvious potential to generate workloads that run in Google and make the company some rupees. Google's scale also means it stands a chance of winning plenty of business – perhaps enough to irritate Amazon.com and Walmart-owned Flipkart, which are vying for domination of India's e-tail scene and are very much the sort of giant ONDC was designed to dilute. ®
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[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/maps-platform/launching-address-descriptors-make-it-easier-find-addresses-using-landmarks-indian-cities
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/09/india_messaging_apps_ban/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZJ1WRa6409qwZ1iR@LUxBgAAAYs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZJ1WRa6409qwZ1iR@LUxBgAAAYs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZJ1WRa6409qwZ1iR@LUxBgAAAYs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/address-descriptors/requests-reverse-geocoding-address-descriptors
[7] https://github.com/google-research-datasets/seegull
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/23/micron_india_assembly_facility/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/01/phone_dam_india/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/11/india_mobile_phone_fm_radio/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/11/google_io_2023_developers/
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZJ1WRa6409qwZ1iR@LUxBgAAAYs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Not just India
Last year, on holiday in Italy, I discovered I had left our Agriturismo taking the room key with me, by mistake. At our next location, I emailed the owner and asked for the postal address to send the key back. She said it would be a lot easier to send it to her mother in the nearby town as package delivery drivers can't ever find their way to the farm correctly.
Then address she gave me was something like (in Italian, of course): "Mrs
A friend of mine has no sense of direction. He also doesn't follow directions very well, which is annoying. He does use GPS, but uses an old Tom Tom that was several years out of date when he got it. He won't use any phone based GPS because we had a bad experience with Apple Maps when it was first launched, and we ended up following it's directions into a carpark. He won't have it that Apple have probably spent and awful lot of money improving Maps since then, and it's largely good, in my experience (I do use it a lot myself).
That's annoying, but when you give him directions manually, if he believes you and allows you to give directions without referring to his Tom Tom, you can't just say "Go up the road, and take the 2nd right", You have to wait until it's the next right, and say "take the next right". If he turns too early, and you end up somewhere where you shouldn't, that's your fault (as has happened when I gave directions).
Not surprisingly, if he offers to drive, I usually refuse now.
Directions
Pre- GPS we had a couple of Americans working for us and they said that at first they found it odd the way Brits gave directions; "..past the station, left on the next roundabout, right at the third set of lights..." etc., whereas in the US it would be " ..left on 3rd, right on Madison, ...etc." Then they realized why: road/street names are virtually invisible to drivers in the UK whereas in many US towns they are of a size and placement where they can be read from the car.