What is Bhashini?

What’s in today’s article?

• Why in news?
• What is Bhashini?
• How does it work?
• What is the importance of Bhashini?
• News Summary: Integration of ChatGPT with WhatsApp for key government schemes

Why in news?

• The Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) is reportedly working on a ChatGPT-powered WhatsApp chatbot to help Indian farmers learn about various government schemes.
  • ChatGPT is a chatbot that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to offer answers to complex queries in a conversational and simple way.
• A small team at MeitY called Bhashini is testing the WhatsApp chatbot powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

What is Bhashini?

• Bhashini is a local language translation mission that aims to break the barrier between various Indian tongues by using available technology.
• This government platform aims to make Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) resources available in the public domain to be used by — Indian MSMEs, startups and individual innovators.

How does  Bhashini work?

• The project is aimed to build and develop an ecosystem where various stakeholders can unite to maintain an ever-evolving repository of data, training and benchmark datasets, open models, tools and technologies.
• This online platform also has a separate ‘Bhasadaan’ section which allows individuals to contribute to multiple crowdsourcing initiatives.
• The contribution can be done in four ways — Suno India, Likho India, Bolo India and Dekho India — where users have to type what they hear or have to validate texts transcribed by others.
• These contributions can help to improve the open repository of data to digitally enrich their native language.

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What is the importance of Bhashini?

• According to Census 2001, India has 22 official languages, 122 major languages and 1599 other languages.
• However, most of the content available on the web in this present age of digitalisation is in English.
• This project aims to break the massive Indian language barrier and it wants developers to offer Indians digital services in their local languages.
• With this, India has a chance to create a roadmap to allow internet access for local languages.
• Bhasini comes with the sole purpose of developing a national digital public platform for languages to provide universal access to content.

This is expected to improve the delivery of digital content in all Indian languages.

• This project is also important considering the increased availability of smartphones and cheaper data rates are allowing the internet to penetrate the remote and rural areas of the country.

News Summary: Integration of ChatGPT with WhatsApp for key government schemes

• Indian government is seeking to harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) for the country’s estimated 150 million farmers.
• For this, Bhashini is building a WhatsApp-based chatbot that relies on information generated by ChatGPT to return appropriate responses to queries.
• And because users, especially farmers in rural areas, may not always want — or be able to — type out their queries, questions can be put to the chatbot using voice notes.

How will the chatbot work?

• A user could simply ask a question using voice notes, and receive a voice-based response generated by ChatGPT.
• The chatbot has been developed keeping in mind sections of India’s rural and agrarian population that most depend on government schemes and subsidies.
• These potential users speak a wide range of languages, which makes it important to build a language model that can successfully identify and understand them.

What are the challenges/concerns in building this chatbot?

• Building a national digital public platform for Indian languages
  • Building a national digital public platform for Indian languages will be critical for the success of the WhatsApp chatbot.
  • To build such a language model, it is essential to have large datasets of the various local languages spoken in India, on which the model can be trained.
• Responses of generative AI models may not always be accurate
  • Technology ethics experts have cautioned that responses of generative AI models like ChatGPT may not always be accurate.

Q1) What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) model developed by OpenAI.It is a variant of the popular GPT-3 (Generative Pertained Transformer 3) model, which has been trained on a massive amount of text data to generate human-like responses to a given input.

Q2) What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

 Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think like humans and mimic their actions. The term may also be applied to any machine that exhibits traits associated with a human mind such as learning and problem-solving.

Source: ChatGPT on WhatsApp: Govt’s Bhashini initiative to use AI for beneficiaries of welfare schemes  |  Bhashini  |  Times of India

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CCU07GFEus&t=3s