With the announcement of tech heavyweights Microsoft and Google, all the commotion surrounding OpenAI’s ChatGPT takes a big turn. On the other hand, India is making great strides toward utilizing artificial intelligence for its farmers.
The Indian Express claims that the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) is creating a team called Bhashini that is working on a WhatsApp chatbot that uses the popular ChatGPT to connect the nation’s farmers with government programs and schemes.
The WhatsApp chatbot that enables the farmers to get information and ask questions using voice notes is being tested by the team. For many farmers who are not very comfortable typing on cellphones, this will be of great assistance.
According to the story, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella reportedly saw a prototype of this WhatsApp chatbot and referenced a related upgrade during the World Economic Forum in Davos. He said that this chatbot would make it easier for Indian farmers to use online government resources.
Although the initiative looks novel, it might take some time since the ChatGPT only accepts English-language input. As a result, it’s critical to increase ChatGPT’s accessibility to regional languages. An official added that in order to deploy the suggested chatbot efficiently, it is important to train the model with larger data sets of the numerous local languages spoken in India. Twelve languages, including English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Kannada, Assamese, Bengali, and Odia, are reportedly supported by the ChatGPT-powered WhatsApp chatbot.
“The majority of folks using this chatbot would not know English,” a different official stated. So, we must train our language processing models in as many Indian languages as feasible in order for their voice inputs to function on the chatbot. With the Bhasha Daan portal, citizens across the nation have offered voices in a sizable number of Indian languages. Also, we maintain a sizable database of every language that Doordarshan broadcasts in.
We have been watching the error made by Bard, Google’s rival for ChatGPT, which opened the door for a $100 million reduction in Google share price. There are thus restrictions on these models. The limitations of ChatGPT are demonstrated by the fact that during the testing phase of this WhatsApp chatbot, we can only receive rudimentary responses to questions on government programs. Furthermore, because it is not set up to provide real-time information, we can only access the data up to 2021.
But in the days to come, everything can alter. Microsoft released an improved version of Bing last week that incorporates ChatGPT. The “Prometheus model,” an upgraded version of GPT 3.5, will power the functionality. According to Microsoft, it will be able to offer information that is more current and is more powerful than GPT 3.5.
One of the officials noted that the application of this WhatsApp chatbot expands after ChatGPT gains the capacity to provide real-time findings. “Farmers can not only acquire information about government programs, but also ask about their eligibility for those programs,” he claims.
