How Government Of India Used Conversational AI During COVID-19: A Case Study

How Government Of India Used Conversational AI During COVID 19: A Case Study

Founded by the government of India, MyGov is the world’s largest citizen engagement platform, with more than half a billion users on the platform. However, with the COVID pandemic outbreak, the platform was facing massive challenges in engaging with Indian citizens. Not only was it struggling to deliver proactive and real-time updates to the citizens of India around the pandemic, but also undergoing several hurdles in bringing out the relevant information. 

Thus with these challenges, the entire purpose of creating the platform was becoming a moot point for the government as well as for the users. Further, the COVID pandemic has given rise to the massive spread of fake news and false information that, in turn, created havoc and confusion among the citizens. Therefore it became imperative for the government to find a solution that can be deployed in the platform for delivering relevant, accurate as well as real-time updates about the pandemic to the citizens. It was also required to enable a search and messaging services which can be designed to tackle erroneous information which led to an irrational suspicion among the users.

Therefore, in order to provide accurate and timely information about the deadly disease to the citizens, as well as allow them to ask relevant questions, which aren’t being answered otherwise, the platform — MyGov decided to deploy artificial intelligence to address these issues. With conversational AI gaining traction amid this pandemic by providing customers with the best user experience, the government of India became reliant on the same. After severe evaluation, MyGov decided to partner with Amplify.ai, a company that deals with conversational AI technology offering an effective channel for better user engagement.

With Amplify.ai’s advanced AI abilities, MyGov not only enabled its users to have a seamless experience on its platform, but also managed to address the widely spread fake news and misinformation related to the pandemic. The aim was to make people aware of this deadly disease, as well as provide relevant information regarding the pandemic.

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How Does It Work?

Amplify.ai is probably the first company that has developed the state-of-the-art enterprise-class conversational AI platform, which is not only persistent but also personalised according to the requirements. Along with that, it provides a seamless messaging-based experience over a variety of conversational surfaces.

For MyGov, Amplify.ai has developed an AI-driven, omnichannel virtual assistant, or a chatbot, that was easily deployed and worked across all the relevant conversational platforms like web chat, Google Search, Maps, as well as Facebook Messenger.

The approach was to build a deep and natural language process for creating a seamless engagement for customers. Here, the virtual assistant, aka chatbot, addresses these personalised interactions of the customers without any sort of manual intervention. The chatbot was designed to ensure all their questions presented by the users are answered, along with proper communication of relevant information and guidelines. The communication was conversational and beyond the traditional and simple menu-based interactions.

For data collection, all relevant documents and posts made by the Ministry of Health and MyGov, related to COVID pandemic are ingested into a MyGov-specific knowledge base managed by Amplify.ai. This serves as the training data for the machine learning system. Along with that, for model development, parallelly, the company has created a conversational tree that supports various narratives and sequences that contain text, graphics, and video.

These narratives form the base structure for providing information to the citizens. At any point in time, citizens can choose to ask a free-form question. These questions are mapped to intents in the machine learning system, which selects the strongest matching content for each intent. Each intent match/miss further informs the ML system in resolving future queries for intents and entities.

In terms of the tech stack, for both frontend and backend, it is proprietary to Amplify.ai. MyGov chose their zero-code solution to build variable-driven complex conversational trees, with a network of intents and entities. Each interaction can be further integrated with client-specific JSON modules that can interface with enterprise-specific frontend and backend calls.

Further, the deployment methods ranged from very simple HTML input/output to a highly complex variable driven interactions that interface with frontend or backend call to client infrastructure.

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Wrapping Up With Benefits

With Amplify.ai’s powerful conversational AI, MyGov managed to create an effective campaign that helped in delivering accurate and relevant information to citizens promptly, bridging the information gap that fake news was creating. Further to this, MyGov also manages to deploy the robust conversation AI technology on Google’s Business Messages that helped in discovering approximately 11,000 shelters in 700 cities amid COVID.

Such an engaging platform allowed not only people from India but people around the world to keep up with the pace of the rapidly changing pandemic. Post the deployment, the messenger conversation on the MyGov platform had more than 60 million messages exchanged.

Along with that having a conversational AI deployed in the platform helped in the faster adoption of COVID guidelines, that were critical for protecting the health of the citizens. As a matter of fact, during the peak of the COVID pandemic, approximately 40,000 users were engaged on the various MyGov platforms per hour leveraging the extraordinary services by the chatbots.

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Sejuti Das
Sejuti currently works as Associate Editor at Analytics India Magazine (AIM). Reach out at sejuti.das@analyticsindiamag.com

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