Artificial intelligence-powered chatbots have been all the rage since ChatGPT launched in November last year. In fact, ChatGPT has been so popular that it passed the 100 million daily active user mark in just two months, a figure that took popular social media apps like TikTok and Instagram much longer to reach.
However, a majority of the Indian public could not access these popular chatbots owing to the language barrier. Only around 11 percent population in India speaks the English language while around 57 percent population speaks Hindi.
Since most government work is done in English, a large section of the Indian public, especially in villages, has not had difficulty in accessing government services.
Microsoft-backed new AI chatbot Jugalbandi promises to make government services easily available to all Indians in their local language using just their mobile phone.
In a blog post about Jugalbandi, Microsoft wrote, “A new generative AI-driven chatbot on mobile devices for government assistance. It can understand questions in multiple languages, whether spoken or typed. It retrieves information on relevant programs – usually written in English – and relays it back in local language.”
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“Jugalbandi AI assistant is powered by language models from AI4Bharat, a government-backed initiative, and reasoning models from Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. It is accessed through the mobile messaging system WhatsApp” the company further wrote
While there is much concern about the risks posed by artificial intelligence technologies, it is equally true that this new age technology could also solve many of the problems that have existed for decades, if not centuries, such as corruption, bribery and red tapism.
“The robot can’t throw our application in the waste bin like the government official does when he’s dissatisfied with the bribe amount,” news agency Bloomberg quoted a domestic worker who participated in a domestic workers’ trial as saying.
Updated: 15 Jun 2023, 10:45 AM IST