Indian government working on Alexa, Google Assistant-like chatbots

In a bid to deliver e-governance services, the Indian government is planning to work on platforms similar to Alexa and Google Assistant. According to reports, the Government on January 1 invited bids to develop a voice assistant similar to Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant.

News agencies like PTI report that AI-based platforms will interact with public in multiple languages. It is also expected to analyse sentiments and collect data to give personalised services to users.

The National E-Governance Division of Ministry of Electronics and IT has invited proposals to build the conversational platform that can be deployed on the UMANG platform , which hosts various apps that provide government services to citizens.

According to the document obtained by PTI, the government is looking for a platform that provide assistance with general such as availing services of government and those available on the UMANG platform such as registration , login, reset the password, department service relation information, event, and new launch. The chatbox is expected to turn speech into a textual input and turn text into speech.

The platform also have other deep learning capabilities, which can be used by platforms for discovery and recommendation of eligible schemes and services to the users of bots/ applications. It would take the project four years to complete.