The Indian government could be working on platforms similar to Alexa and Google Assistant to deliver e-governance services. The government has invited bids to develop a chatbot or voice assistance application like Amazon’s Alexa or Google Assistant to deliver e-governance services to the public.
As per the PTI report, the AI-based platforms will interact with the public in multiple languages. It is also expected to analyze sentiments and collect data to give personalized services to users. The report states that the National E-Governance Division of Ministry of Electronics and IT has invited proposals to build the conversational platform that can be deployed on the UMANG platform, which hosts various apps that provide government services to citizens.
“The platform should be able to assist with general tasks, including but not limited to availing services of government and available on the UMANG platform such as registration, login, reset password, department service relation information, event, (and) new launch…etc,” the request for proposal document said.
The chatbot should be able to turn speech into a textual input and turn text into speech.
“Platforms should also have other deep learning capabilities, which can be used by platforms for discovery and recommendation of eligible schemes and services to the users of bots/applications.
“Users should be recommended best-fit schemes and services available in government domain based on his/her profile,” the document said.
The term of the project will be four years from the date it goes live.
NeGD has fixed January 12 for the pre-bid conference and January 25 for the last date of bid submission. Bids will open on January 27, the evaluation will be done by February 5, and the work order is scheduled for the second week of February, according to the document.
On another note, Amazon Alexa got a host of new features recently. Amazon rolled out a group voice and video calling feature on Alexa-enabled devices. If you have Echo devices including the Echo, Echo Dot, and Echo Show, you can host a group call by giving commands like “Alexa, call my college group”. Before giving a command like that, make sure that you have saved the group by the same name on the Alexa App. Users can add up to up to six participants including them.
