Incorporating the same the same technology that underpins ChatGPT, Jugalbandi, (a Hindi word mean a duet between two musicians), a chatbot built in collaboration by Microsoft, the open-source initiative OpenNyAI, and AI4Bharat, backed by the Indian government, will redefine information access for all in India.
This chatbot offers insights into more than 170 of approximately 20,000 government programs that India offers. Currently, it can understand, transcribe, and translate text and voice queries in 10 of India’s 22 official languages.
11% of the country’s population is proficient in English, with a slight majority of 57% comfortable with Hindi. “That leaves vast numbers of the population unable to access government programs because of language barriers,” Microsoft explained in a blog post.
While the Jugalbandi chatbot is still new, it could one day offer all Indians easy access to information in a local language through a mobile phone, instead of having to head to the local community service center just to get basic information.
“We saw this Jugalbandi as a kind of ‘chatbot plus plus’ because it’s like a personalized agent,” said Abhigyan Raman, a project officer at AI4Bharat, an open-source language AI center based at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in Chennai that is a collaborator on the chatbot.
“It understands your exact problem in your language and then tries to deliver the right information [in the language that was used for the query] reliably and inexpensively, even if that exists in some other language in a database somewhere,” said Smita Gupta, a lawyer who works for OpenNyAI, a collaborative whose mission is to bring greater access to law and justice through AI. It is one of several groups working on the chatbot.
“If you can solve and build for India,” said Gupta, “you can solve and build for the world.”
The Jugalbandi AI assistant is powered by language models from AI4Bharat, a government-backed initiative, and reasoning models from Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. It is accessed through the mobile messaging system WhatsApp, which is widely used in India, and the duet in this case is the conversation between the user and the chatbot.
This is just the beginning. India’s complexity makes it a test bed for multilingual settings everywhere.
