An Indian research group backed by Microsoft and Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani is using generative AI, the technology behind the hit chatbot ChatGPT, for a mobile assistant that aims to make information about government programs accessible in multiple languages.
The Jugalbandi bot, named after a duet in which two musicians play catch, uses language models from government agency AI4Bharat and artificial intelligence technologies from Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service.
Running on Meta Platforms’ WhatsApp messaging service, the bot can understand questions in ten Indian languages and retrieve information usually written in English from government websites and relay it in local languages.
Microsoft said the robot could help bridge the language barrier in India, where English is spoken by only 11% of the 1.4 billion people, citing examples where it helped a student get a scholarship and a farmer apply for a pension for his parents.
However, there are problems of accuracy.
Like Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing, Jugalbandi can sometimes provide answers that sound convincing but are made up – a tendency that has been called hallucination.
Jugalbandi’s application is also limited by a lack of data, as organizations often lack the bandwidth and expertise to create data pipelines to feed the bot.
“These models do make mistakes. They are probabilistic machines,” said Pratyush Kumar, co-principal researcher at AI4Bharat and principal researcher at Microsoft Research India.
He added that AI4Bharat is working to address these issues by seeking input from organisations like Gram Vaani, a Delhi-based social enterprise that works closely with farmers.
