The government on 31st December invited bids for developing a chat bot or voice assistant application like Amazon’s Alexa or Google Assistant for delivering e-governance services to the public. The artificial intelligence-based conversational platform might interact with the public in multiple languages, analyse sentiments and intent, collect and analyse data to provide personalized experience to users.
National E-Governance Division of Ministry of Electronics and IT has invited proposals for building a conversational platform that can be deployed at the UMANG platform that hosts different apps which provide government services to citizens. The request for proposal document stated that the platform might be able to provide assistance with normal tasks but not limited to availing services of government and available at UMANG platform like registration, login, reset password, department service relation information, event, new launch, etc.
The chatbot might be able to change speech into textual input and change text into speech. The document said that platforms must have other deep learning abilities that can be used by platforms for discovery and recommendation of eligible schemes and services to the users of bots and applications. Users should be suggested best-fit schemes and services available in government domain on the basis of his or her performance.
The term of the project will be for four years starting from the date when it will go live. NeGD has fixed the date of 12th January for pre-bid conference and 25th January as the last date of bid submission. Bids will open on 27th January, evaluation will be done by 5th February and work order is planned for the second week of February, as stated in the document.