MeitY may soon integrate ChatGPT with WhatsApp for key government schemes

Published
13th Feb, 2023

Context

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.

About

Key highlights of the development

Bhashini, a small team at the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY), is currently building a WhatsApp-based chatbot that relies on information generated by ChatGPT to return appropriate responses to queries.
- Essentially, voice memos could be used to make requests to the chatbot, which would then respond with a voice-based response produced by ChatGPT.
Benefits: The ChatGPT-powered WhatsApp chatbot will let users send a question via voice notes. This will help numerous farmers in India who may not be familiar with typing on smartphones.
Why WhatsApp: WhatsApp has more than 500 million users, and even those with relatively low digital literacy know their way around the app.
Background: This development comes as the competition between Google and Microsoft over the future of internet search heats up.

What are the persistent limitations?

ChatGPT is occasionally found to generate incorrect answers to queries.
This can potentially produce harmful instructions or biased content.
The chatbot’s knowledge is limited to events before 2021.
It is also unable to provide answers to country-specific questions.
It is only capable of providing generalized answers, unlike Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa which are more focused on giving specific answers to user queries

About Bhashini

Digital India BHASHINI is India’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) led language translation platform.
Bhashini aims to build a National Public Digital Platform for languages to develop services and products for citizens by leveraging the power of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.

About ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a chatbot powered by AI that can be used to ask queries.
This chatbot is designed in such a way that the replies to the queries are both technical and jargon-free.
It is a natural language processing (NLP) model that uses a large corpus of conversational data.
It is capable of generating human-like replies, allowing natural conversation between the user and the virtual assistant.
The chatbot uses Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) technology. However, it is modified to appear more friendly to humans.
It is based on GPT-3.5 – a deep-learning language model that produces human-like text.
The technology produces different answers for the same question in the future since it improves over time and understands queries better through machine learning.