BASHINI
1. Context
As the battle between tech giants Google and Microsoft over the future of Internet search intensifies, something enormously significant is happening in India, seeking to harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) for the country’s estimated 150 million farmers. WhatsApp, the enormously popular messaging service, could soon facilitate search on key government schemes, powered by the sensational AI chatbot ChatGPT, and an ambitious national-level programme that aims to build vast crowdsourced datasets with samples of Indian voices in several local languages.
2. Bashini
- Digital India BHASHINI is India’s artificial intelligence (AI) led language translation platform.
- A Bhashini Platform will make Artificial Intelligence (AI) and National Language Processing (NLP) resources available to MSME (Medium, Small and Micro Enterprises), Startups and Individual Innovators in the public domain.
- Bhashini Platform is a part of the National Language Translation Mission.
- The mission aims to ensure that as more Indians connect to the internet, they are able to access global content in their own languages.
3. Importance of Bashini
- It will empower Indian citizens by connecting them to the Digital Initiatives of the country in their own language thereby leading to digital inclusion.
- It will also encourage participation of startups.
- Mission will create and nurture an ecosystem involving Central/State government agencies and start-ups, working together to develop and deploy innovative products and services in Indian languages.
- It is a giant step to realize the goal of Digital Government.
- It also aims to increase the content in Indian languages on the Internet substantially in the domains of public interest, particularly, governance-and-policy, science & technology, etc., thus will encourage citizens to use the Internet in their own language.
4. How will the bot understand and interpret local languages?
- While ChatGPT has impressed with its ability to respond to complex queries in fascinating and eloquent ways, building a national digital public platform for Indian languages will be critical for the success of the WhatsApp chatbot that the Bhashini team is working on.
- 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, officials said. And this is where an initiative called Bhasha Daan comes in.
- In the test phase, the model currently supports 12 languages including English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, Odia, and Assamese.
- If a user were to send a voice note in any of these languages, the chatbot will successfully return a response.
5. Concerns
- Technology ethics experts have cautioned that responses of generative AI models like ChatGPT may not always be accurate.
- Last week, when Google unveiled Bard, its competitor to ChatGPT, the bot made a factual error about the James Webb Space Telescope. The company’s shares dropped by $100 billion after the mistake was spotted.
- In its current testing phase, the WhatsApp chatbot can only respond to simple queries about government schemes, etc.
- This is primarily due to the current limitation of ChatGPT itself the fact that it cannot access information from the Internet in real time.
- ChatGPT’s language model was trained on a dataset that only includes information until 2021.
For Prelims
| For Prelims: ChatGPT, Whatsapp, Bashini, Artificial Intelligence (AI), National Language Processing (NLP), MSME (Medium, Small and Micro Enterprises) and Digital Government. |
Source: The Indian Express
