AI Assistant Jugalbandi Bot, Supported By An Indian Group Backed By Nandan Nilekani

Generative AI will be used by an Indian research team supported by Nandan Nilekani, the co-founder of Infosys and Microsoft. This is the technology that underlies the popular chatbot ChatGPT, whose goal is to provide information on government initiatives in a variety of languages.

The bot is called Jugalbandi, which is usually the name of a duet in which two artists riff off one another. The Jugalbandi bot uses artificial intelligence technology through Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service as well as language models from AI4Bharat, a government-sponsored organisation.

The Jugalbandi bot uses the WhatsApp chat platform. This bot can retrieve information that is often written in English on official government websites and comprehend inquiries in 10 different Indian languages.

According to Microsoft’s news and information, the bot can overcome the language barrier in India, where only 11% of the population speaks English.

These are some of the challenges that the Jugalbandi bot addresses:

The Jugalbandi bot, like Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing, can provide answers that sound plausible but are actually the result of a behaviour known as hallucination.

These models can occasionally lead to errors, according to Pratyush Kumar, co-principal investigator at AI4Bharat and principal researcher at Microsoft Research India.

Pratyush Kumar added that AI4Bharat is seeking input from groups like Gramme Vaani, a social company based in Delhi that closely collaborates with farmers, in an effort to develop answers to these problems.