Indian Government is working on Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant-like chatbots for advanced Public services

According to some major reports floating around, the Indian government is planning to transform the way it delivers some of its public services. On 1st January 2021, the National E-Governance Division of Ministry of Electronics and IT has invited bids to develop a chatbot or voice assistance application to provide e-governance services through its portals. How amazing is that? Imagine your grievances are being solved by voice assistance application, thus being available every time. The reports also suggest that these chatbots will be very similar to what we have seen in Amazon’s Alexa or Google Assistant. 

The question arises why is the government of India willing to transform its system to an artificial intelligence-based conversational platform? One of the core reasons behind this can be the problem of multiple languages. India, being a multilingual country, has faced problems where the government officials have to transfer the calls or ask the speaker to converse in a language that is familiar to the official. Thus, an AI-based voice assistant will interpret the voice and interact in that language. Not only this, the government plans to enable such a voice assistant that can interpret the sentiments and analyze data to deliver a personalized experience to users.

The invitation has been rolled out and now the companies will express their interest to build this AI-based conversational platform. This chatbot or voice assistant can be deployed on the UMANG platform.

The request for proposal document said, “The platform should be able to provide assistance with general tasks, including but not limited to availing services of government and available on the UMANG platform such as registration, login, reset the password, department service relation information, event, (and) new launch…etc.” This conversational platform will have deep learning capabilities alongside the ability to turn speech into a textual input and turn text into speech. 

The National E-Governance Division of Ministry of Electronics and IT has fixed January 25 as the last date of bid submission. On January 12, the pre-bid conference will take place. Evaluation of the bids will be done by 5th February.

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