MeitY’s Bhashini proposes a WhatsApp chatbot powered by ChatGPT for farmers

A team called Bhashini of the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) is reportedly developing a WhatsApp chatbot powered by the sensational ChatGPT, which helps the farmers in the country to get in touch with the government schemes and programmes.

When all the fuss about OpenAI’s ChatGPT takes a significant turn with the announcement of tech giants Microsoft and Google, India, on the other side, is taking a huge step in harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence for farmers in India.

According to The Indian Express, a team called Bhashini of the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) is reportedly developing a WhatsApp chatbot powered by the sensational ChatGPT, which helps the farmers in the country to get in touch with the government schemes and programmes.

The team is testing the WhatsApp chatbot that enables the farmers to receive updates and ask queries through voice notes. This will be a great help for many farmers who are not much familiar with typing on smartphones.

The report claims that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was shown a model of this WhatsApp chatbot, and he mentioned an update similar to this at World Economic Forum in Davos. He suggested that this chatbot will help the farmers in India access government programmes through the internet.

Though the initiative seems innovative, this may take time, as the ChatGPT entirely relies on input in the English language. Therefore, it is important to broaden the access of ChatGPT to local languages. An official stated it is pertinent to train the model to have larger data sets of various local languages spoken in India to use the proposed chatbot effectively. By reports, the WhatsApp chatbot powered by ChatGPT supports 12 languages, including English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Kannada, Assamese, Bengali, and Odia.

Another official said, “Most of those using this chatbot would not know English. So, for their voice inputs to work on the chatbot, we must train our language processing models in as many Indian languages as possible. We have a decent-sized repository of voices in many Indian languages that people of the country have contributed through the Bhasha Daan portal. We also have a vast database of all the languages that Doordarshan broadcasts in”.

We have been witnessing the mistake caused by Bard, Google’s competitor for ChatGPT, that paved the way for a drop of $100 million in shares of Google. Hence there are limitations to such kinds of models. During the testing phase of this WhatsApp chatbot, we can only get the answers to simple queries related to government schemes, which shows the limitations of ChatGPT. Moreover, we can only access the information up to 2021 as it is not trained to give real-time information.

But this can change in the coming days. Last week, Microsoft announced its updated version of Bing with the integration of ChatGPT. The feature will be powered by an updated version of GPT 3.5 which is called the “Prometheus model”. Microsoft explains it is more powerful than GPT 3.5 and will be able to deliver information that is more up-to-date.

One of the officials mentioned that once ChatGPT acquires the ability to deliver real-time results, the scope of this WhatsApp chatbot increases. He says, “The farmers can not only get the information regarding government schemes, but also inquire about their eligibility for those schemes.” India ai