National Cloud of NIC

Conversational AI in the form of virtual assistants, chatbots, and voicebots has gained popularity as it can be used to automate the task of answering user queries that are repetitive in nature. A chatbot is a piece of web-based software that conducts a conversation via auditory and/or textual methods and is often designed to simulate how a human would behave as a conversation partner. This can enable user organisations or departments to expedite their mundane administrative processes by relieving them of tasks that can be answered by the systems. Chatbots and voicebots can help provide services to the end user in an efficient manner 24x7.

The “Chatbot as a Service” can help you build layered, modular, pluggable chatbots following the indigenously developed VANI "Virtual Assistant of NIC" framework. The framework consists of various modules that are capable of performing API integration with back-end systems, queue management, agent monitoring, and live handovers to human agents and can be added to the chatbot as required. Using this framework, multiple chat, voice, or mobile app-based bots can be deployed to interact with the back-end engine by maintaining individual sessions, thus ensuring the privacy of each conversation. Other than Indian English, the chatbots can support 11 Indian languages: Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Odia, Malayalam, Punjabi, and Nepali. For multilingual bot creation, users shall be required to subscribe for an additional "MATRA as a Service" (an Indic phonetic transliteration API) on: https://bharatapi.gov.in/store/?tenant=matra.nic.in. Using Matra, the end user of the chatbot can type using the standard QWERTY keyboard for any non-English language, eliminating the need to learn or map new language keyboards. The "Voice based Support Services" provide both the normal DTMF (selection of menu items based on key presses on the phone keypad) or voice-based selection, both in short phrases or using NLP-based support, which becomes a Voicebot. Similar to the text-based chat-based services, API integration, queue management, agent monitoring, and help desk support are also provided as per user department or organisation requirements.
As the naming and purpose of intents and action parameters of individual bots can differ from case to case, the modular layers of the bots can be customized to suit the purposes of the user organisation or departments requirements. The chatbots and voicebots take the necessary precautions to ensure the confidentiality and privacy of the users data by handling the data flow exclusively through the users application and restricting the data flow between the user and other third-party applications (e.g., Google Dialog Flow).