Microsoft launched Jugalbandi' AI chatbot

Almost all the important data about government services generally gets published in English, while only a few percent of the Indian population work in English. But due to this, it becomes problematic for other people who only understand their local language or Hindi for that matter. Due to the language barrier, they can not fully utilise those services. To solve this problem, Microsoft and the Indian government have launched a chatbot 'Jugalbandi'. Users can use this easily on WhatsApp Messenger.

This is a joint effort of AI assistant AI4Bharat and Microsoft's Azure Open AI service. This chatbot simplifies the answers to user's queries in their local language. It provides research with selective, filtered results and without traditional search results. This Jugalbandi chatbot works like a personal agent. It is easy to use, users just have to put a text message or voice message on WhatsApp number (will provide) and then it will be interpreted by the speech recognition model of AI4Bharat. Bhashini, a translation solution, then translates it into English. The open AI service model will help to recover information to form an answer.

Its test use was done in April in Bhiwani village and till date, the chatbot can understand 10 Indian languages out of 22. With the help of Jugalbandi, people from India can have conversations with the chatbot 'Jugalbandi' (as the name suggested) and they can effectively use government services.