Microsoft launched a ChatGPT rival in India to help rural villagers in 'media-dark areas' access government services

• Jugalbandi is an AI-chatbot villagers in India can use to learn about government programs.
• The chatbot can understand, transcribe, and translate text and voice queries in many Indian languages.

AI chatbots are coming for rural villages in India.

Earlier this week, Microsoft, along with AI organizations OpenNyAI and AI4Bharat, launched Jugalbandi, an AI chatbot designed for mobile devices that can help all Indians — especially those in underserved communities — access information for up to 171 government programs, according to Microsoft.

Using voice recognition and natural language processing models, Jugalbandican can understand, transcribe, and translate text and voice queries in 10 official languages in India — a country where up to 120 different languages are spoken, Smita Gupta, a lawyer at OpenNYAI, said in Microsoft's product launch video. In turn, the chatbot can respond to questions through written and verbal speech.

"We saw this Jugalbandi as a kind of 'chatbot plus plus' because it's like a personalized agent," Abhigyan Raman, a senior AI researcher AI4Bharat, a collaborator, told Microsoft.

Backed by the Indian government, Jugalbandi aims to address the "technical" and "linguistic" divide in remote parts of the country, Raman said in the chatbot's launch video.

"These are all communities living in media-dark areas, which means that penetration of traditional media like television and radio is very sparse," Aaditeshwar Seth, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, said in the video. Seth also mentioned India's "literacy challenges," where newspapers have "very low access" in those areas.

Microsoft said community volunteers have been introducing the chatbot to Indian villages since early April — and so far, the results have been promising.

Vandna, an 18-year-old freshman at a college in the village of Ferozepur Jhirka, used the chatbot last month to find scholarships, according to Microsoft's blog post.

She asked the chatbot "What kind of scholarships are available for me?" in Hindi and added political science, Hindi, and history as her course of study. As a result, the chatbot spit out a list of government programs, to which she picked one and asked the bot follow-up questions, providing her with info on eligibility criteria and the documents required for the application.

"Jugalbandi gives me one answer at a time," Vandna told Microsoft in Hindi. "It's easier to understand."

Farmers have also used Jugalbandi to seek advice on how to apply for pensions and why they stopped receiving government assistant payments, according to Microsoft.

The announcement comes as generative AI tools take the world by storm. Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT last November, big tech companies like Google have released their own AI chatbots in a race to make the most impressive AI. Baidu, a Chinese tech giant, even launched Ernie, its own chatbot, to Chinese residents this year.

Now India is entering the AI arms race.

Moving forward, Microsoft hopes Jugalbandi can be used to seek medical information in Urdu and English-language court documents in Tamil, according to the company's blog post.

"The rate of diffusion of this next generation of AI is unlike anything we've seen, but even more remarkable is the sense of empowerment it has already unlocked in every corner of the world, including rural India," Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella tweeted.

Microsoft's Asia division didn't respond to Insider's immediate request for comment.