MeitY to integrate ChatGPT with WhatsApp for farmers

New Delhi: The Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) is reportedly working on a ChatGPT-powered WhatsApp chatbot to help educate farmers about various government schemes.

According to sources, a small team at MeitY called Bhashini is testing the WhatsApp chatbot powered by OpenAI's ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a chatbot that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to offer answers to complex queries in a conversational (and simple) way. The new report points out that ChatGPT-powered WhatsApp chatbot will also let users send a question via voice notes.

The Bhashini team is currently building a WhatsApp-based chatbot that relies on information generated by ChatGPT to return appropriate responses to queries. And because people, especially farmers in rural areas, may not always want to type out their queries, questions can be asked on the chatbot through voice notes. In essence, queries on the chatbot could be simply asked through voice notes, following which it would return a voice-based response generated by ChatGPT.

Interestingly, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella mentioned a similar update at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos. He stated that Indian farmers would be able to utilise a GPT interface to access an obscure government programme through the internet.

The chatbot, which is currently under testing, is being developed keeping in mind India's rural and agrarian population – the sections of society that most depend on government schemes and subsidies – and the various languages spoken by them. And in that context, it becomes important to build a language model that can successfully identify and understand local languages spoken by the country's rural population, said a senior government official associated with the project.

While responses generated by ChatGPT have so far impressed many with its ability to respond to complex queries in fascinating and eloquent ways, building a national digital public platform for Indian languages will be key for the WhatsApp chatbot that the Bhashini team is building to succeed. To build such a language model, the official said, it is pertinent to have large datasets of the various local languages spoken in India on which the model can be trained. This is where an initiative called Bhasha Daan comes in, he explained. It is an ambitious project which aims to crowdsource voice datasets in multiple Indian languages.

In the test phase, the model currently supports 12 languages, including English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, Odia, and Assamese. This means that if a user sends a voice note to the chatbot in any of these languages, the chatbot will successfully return with a response to it.

In a country where despite rising rural connectivity to the global Internet, there exists a stark digital divide, the official said, adding that the choice of WhatsApp as the delivery platform was a deliberate one.

"WhatsApp has more than 500 million users, and even those with relatively low digital literacy know their way around the app," he added.