The Indian government has decided to make use of ChatGPT instead of rejecting it out of fears of misuse.
Basic info
It is building an educational tool using ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot backed by Microsoft, that could soon be used by school students to complete their school and college assignments.
This tool can help school students get answers to questions related to their curriculum.
However there’s a catch. They may get their answers in any Indian language apart from English.
Successful demos
In a video demonstration a student posted a voice message of a math query in Hindi on a WhatsApp chat.
The voice note was first converted into text in Devanagari script and then the answer appeared on the chat itself.
The whole process took mere seconds.
In another instance, the student took a screenshot of a math question from his textbook, sent it to a WhatsApp chatbot and received the solution just as quickly.
Tech platforms that were utilised
Several tech platforms have been leveraged to build the first version of this tool – the government’s Bhashini platform which translates between languages using AI, the Diksha platform that digitizes school curriculum, messaging platform WhatsApp, and edtech platform Doubtnut.
How it is intended to work
First, a student will post a question in a vernacular language on the WhatsApp chatbot.
This gets translated into English in the back-end by Bhashini.
The question will then be processed by ChatGPT, which will be trained on DIKSHA and Doubtnut’s repository of lessons.
The answer that ChatGPT delivers will again be translated back into the language of the question by Bhashini and posted as a reply to the student’s WhatsApp query.
Launch
On the question of when the tool will launch, a senior government official said that it will be launched ‘soon’ after the testing phase is completed.
“We are expecting millions of queries by students to come in simultaneously once it is launched.
That’s why we have to make sure that nothing breaks and all parts of the tech work smoothly in tandem when it is launched widely,” he said.
Another tool that the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) is using ChatGPT for will effectively turn WhatsApp into a search engine for government schemes.
How will this work?
When a person posts a voice note on the WhatsApp chat relating to any scheme, the tool returns a response with all relevant details such as when it was started, the objectives of the scheme, eligibility for applying, documents required, etc.
“We did an API integration of WhatsApp APIs with Bhashini APIs and ChatGPT APIs.
So, that allows you to ask any question on our WhatsApp interface in any language of your choice and get the answer.
You can also ask something with an audio and get the reply in audio,” said the official.
Digital inclusion
He continued, “What it does is that it ensures digital inclusion for everyone.
Many people are not able to type in their questions.
Now, they can just post a query through an audio note in their own language and get an answer also in the same format,”
The next phase of this project will include feature phones that don’t have access to WhatsApp.
For this part, the government is testing the integration of ChatGPT and Bhashini with feature phones so that a person can call up a toll-free number instead and receive a response.
