India developing localised bot based on ChatGPT tech: Report

The government of India is reportedly using OpenAI’s ChatGPT for information dissemination about national-level programs and schemes. According to a February 13 report by The Indian Express, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s (MeitY) Bhashini team is building a WhatsApp-based chatbot, which runs on GPT-3 — the AI model behind OpenAI's ChatGPT. The bot will provide responses to user queries about government schemes and policies. Bhashini is a MeitY initiative for building a national public digital platform for languages using artificial intelligence. 

The chatbot will be able to accept queries in different Indian languages and even in voice format (through voice notes). The chatbot especially targets the rural and farmer communities, which are most dependent on government schemes and subsidies. Currently, the chatbot supports 12 languages including English, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu, among others. The initiative has used different language datasets available in the open data repository Bhasha Daan under Bhashini.

The tool is currently in the testing phase and can only respond to simple queries and can not access real-time information from the internet. This is because of ChatGPT’s own limitation of being trained on data only till the year 2021.

Notably, the chatbot was also shown to Microsoft chief Satya Nadella. At the World Economic Forum annual meeting 2023 in Davos, Switzerland, Nadella spoke about a demo of ChatGPT-based chatbot that was showcased to him during his India visit in January for responding to a query about a government scheme.

Earlier this month, ChatGPT became the fastest consumer application to hit the 100 million users mark, overtaking Facebook and Google. Microsoft, which has invested $11 billion till now in ChatGPT’s creator OpenAI, announced that it is integrating the tool into its search engine Bing. Calling it the AI copilot for the web, the AI-powered Bing search engine is available in preview now.