'Jugalbandi' Chatbot Aimed At Rural India Backed By Microsoft Coming Soon

A new chatbot aimed at the diverse Indian audience is currently in the works. A research group backed by Microsoft and Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani will using generative AI capabilities (like ChatGPT) to make information about government schemes accessible in multiple languages.

The AI chatbot is called Jugalbandi and uses language models from government-backed AI4Bharat, supported by Microsoft's Azure OpenAI service.

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What can Jugalbandi do?

The Jugalbandi chatbot is named after a performance in Indian classical music that represents a duet between two solo musicians. According to Reuters, the Jugalbandi chatbot will be able to operate on Meta-owned WhatsApp messaging services.

Jugalbandi will be able to understand questions in 10 Indian languages and will be able to retrieve information written in English on government websites and translate it to the local language of the user's choice.

"I tested this when I visited India recently and I had two realisations. First, that we can build things can make a difference to 8 billion people and not just a small group of people. And, this diffusion will be able to take place in just days and weeks rather than years and centuries. With this we also ensure protection of fundamental right," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella during his keynote address while introducing Jugalbandi.

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While this chatbot could help improve the reach of various government schemes, such chatbots are not perfect. Jugalbandi can sometimes generate responses that are factually incorrect or made up, a tendency that is called hallucination.

"Sometimes these models do make errors. They are probabilistic machines," said Pratyush Kumar, co-principal investigator at AI4Bharat and a key researcher at Microsoft Research India.

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According to Kumar, AI4Bharat is attempting to resolve these concerns by gathering feedback from various organisations that closely work with the communities that this feature is aimed at. One such organisation is Gram Vaani that works closely with farmers. The chatbot was launched in April and has been tested in Biwan, a village situated near New Delhi.

What do you think about this chatbot - do you think it will be useful? Let us know in the comments below. For more in the world of technology and science, keep reading Indiatimes.com.