A WhatsApp chatbot powered by ChatGPT provides Indian farmers with information about government schemes: report

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logo of ChatGPT and OpenAI

The Indian government’s Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) is reportedly planning to use ChatGPT, a language model trained by OpenAI, with WhatsApp to help Indian farmers learn and understand several government schemes. A team at MeitY called Bhashini is currently testing a WhatsApp chatbot powered by ChatGPT, according to a report by The Indian Express.

The ChatGPT-powered WhatsApp chatbot will assist users by responding to their queries, which can be sent through voice notes. This will particularly come in handy for Indian farmers who may not be familiar with typing on smartphones. Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft, had also stated at the World Economic Forum that Indian farmers will soon be able to access a government program through a GPT interface using the internet.

Although the ChatGPT model powering the WhatsApp chatbot was displayed to Nadella, the integration of ChatGPT with WhatsApp for farmers might take some time as the AI program currently works on inputs fed in the English language and lacks support for local languages. An official stated to the publication that large datasets of several local Indian languages need to be created to train the AI chatbot on them.

The report cited notes from officials, stating that “a majority of the people that will use this chatbot will 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 to through the Bhasha Daan portal. We also have a vast database of all the languages that Doordarshan telecasts in.”

The AI-based chatbot is part of sophisticated systems that produce content from text to images, which is set to be one of the most disruptive forces in a decade to big tech, industries, and the future of work. According to Open AI, the AI-based ChatGPT platform has been trained using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). In other words, the human AI trainers initially provided conversations in which they played both the AI assistant and the user. The company also gave access to trainers through model-written suggestions that helped the trainers to compose their responses.

In conclusion, the integration of ChatGPT with WhatsApp will help Indian farmers understand and learn about several government schemes. However, the integration process might take some time as the AI program currently lacks support for local languages. Nevertheless, the initiative will be a significant step forward in making government schemes more accessible to a wider audience, particularly those who may not be proficient in English.

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