Microsoft Launches an AI-Based Multilingual Chatbot for Rural India

Microsoft is launching an AI-based multilingual Chatbot called 'Jugalbandi' for rural India

Microsoft has announced 'Jugalbandi,' a new generative AI-driven chatbot developed for farmers and other users in rural India. The chatbot is being created in partnership with Microsoft Research, the government-supported AI4Bharat – an open-source language AI institute located at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras – and OpenNyAI.

According to a news release, the multilingual chatbot will use the WhatsApp messaging service to provide information about government programs in different languages.  Microsoft has stated that the AI-Based multilingual Chatbot could be able to help India, where just 11% of the country's 1.4 billion people speak English, overcome its language barrier. Furthermore, just 57% of Indians can communicate in Hindi, meaning that "a large portion of the population is unable to access government programs due to language barriers."

As a result, "Jugalbandi offers all Indians easy access to information in the local language through a mobile phone, instead of having to head to the local community service center and stand in queue just to get basic information," according to the business.

Furthermore, the company said that the chatbot for rural India recognizes a user's particular problem in their language and then strives to offer the relevant information consistently and affordably, even if it resides in a database someplace in another language.

To utilize the chatbot, simply message "hi" to a certain number, as you would with any other WhatsApp chatbot. "A villager initiates the Jugalbandi bot by sending a text or audio message to a WhatsApp number." The AI4 Bharat voice recognition model is used to convert this to text. "The Bhashini translation model trained by AI4Bharat then translates this to English," Microsoft wrote on its blog.

"Azure OpenAI Service's model retrieves information on the relevant government scheme based on the prompt." The response has been translated into Hindi. "This is then synthesized using the AI4Bharat text-to-speech model and returned to WhatsApp – and the villager's ear," the business explained.

Jugalbandi now covers 10 of India's 22 official languages and 171 of the nearly 20,000 government initiatives. However, the firm has indicated that the program still has "rough edges," but that AI4Bharat is attempting to tackle difficulties by soliciting feedback from groups such as Gramme Vaani, a Delhi-based social enterprise that works directly with farmers.