Government plans chat bot like Alexa, Google Voice to deliver public services

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The government on December 31 invited bids to develop a chat bot or voice assistance application like Amazon's Alexa or Google Assistant to deliver e-governance services to the public.

The artificial intelligence-based conversational platform is expected to interact with the public in multiple languages, analyse sentiments and intent, collect and analyse data to give personalised experience to users.

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 provide assistance 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 pre-bid conference and January 25 for the last date of bid submission. Bids will open on January 27, evaluation will be done by February 5 and work order is scheduled for the second week of February, according to the document.