Indian Communities Are Reached By Microsoft’s AI

Only a few months have passed since ChatGPT was introduced to the public by Microsoft and OpenAI, igniting fervour among tech giants and hobbyists. The generative AI’s underlying technology is now breaking down barriers and making its way to little towns hundreds of miles from the tech buzz of Seattle and San Francisco.

By providing information on more than 170 government programs in 10 indigenous languages, Jugalbandi, a chatbot developed in partnership by Microsoft, the open-source initiative OpenNyAI, and AI4Bharat, with support from the Indian government, is making headway in redefining information access for villagers in India.

India is the second-largest wireless market in the world, yet the technological advancement seen in its metropolis is conspicuously lacking in smaller towns and villages. A pitiful 11% of the country’s population can speak English fluently, with a slim majority of 57% at ease with Hindi. These populations struggle with literacy problems as well because they don’t even have regular access to traditional media.

Because of language barriers, a sizable portion of the population is unable to access government programmes, according to a blog post by Microsoft.

Jugalbandi uses WhatsApp, a platform with almost complete recognition in India, to close this gap. With the use of reasoning models from Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and language models from AI4Bharat, Jugalbandi enables users to ask questions and receive answers in both text and speech, all in their native tongue.

At the company’s Build conference on Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella declared, “This time, this technology reaches everyone in the world.” The following two points particularly stuck out to me: “Things we build can actually affect 8 billion people, not just some select few… We want equal growth and trust in technology to defend the fundamental rights that are important to us, and we want to be able to do that via diffusion, which takes days and weeks rather than years and millennia.

Microsoft sees Jugalbandi growing and eventually helping villagers with a variety of needs, with India serving as the perfect location for the tech giant.

The American internet giant is also advancing its partnerships with numerous Indian businesses in an effort to democratise access to information for the general public. Among them is Gramme Vaani. Gramme Vaani, situated in Delhi, operates a voice-responsive interactive platform. This approach enables volunteers to provide farmers with tailored help and guidance. According to the company, it now has 3 million subscribers across northern and central India.