Umang app will soon have its own voice-enabled chatbot
- The first suite of services should be ready in the next three months, and the company is working closely with the Umang team right now to build a plan
New Delhi: Umang, the central government’s app for citizens to access all its services, will soon have its own voice-based chatbot. The bot, which is being built using conversational AI technologies, will allow users to ask questions in Hindi and English, and through voice or text, about various government services.
About ten services will be integrated at first, including passport services, blood banks, PF and more, ccording to Shridhar Marri, chief executive officer of Senseforth AI, the company building the bot, a. Marri said the first suite of services should be ready in the next three months, and the company is working closely with the Umang team right now to build a plan. He explained that the Umang app will have an icon that allows users to ask questions about various government services, like finding the nearest blood bank or checking the balance in one’s PF account.
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“We will be building a few services in the next few months and eventually cover the entire spectrum of thousands of services. All of them will be handled by us, to create conversational AI services," he said.
The bot will be accessible through the Umang app, and the company is also integrating it into the platform’s integrated voice response (IVR) service for telephone calls. On the IVR, the bot will answer user queries and there will be an option to hand over the call to a human operator if required. Senseforth is the company behind HDFC Bank’s Extended Virtual Assistant (EVA), in 2019.
Conversational bots have been gaining prominence over the past year, especially since covid-19 response bots have accustomed people to interacting with such services. The global chatbot market is expected to grow from $2.9 billion in 2020 to a massive $10.5 billion by 2026, according to reports.
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