The rising popularity of AI chatbots, like ChatGPT, has paved the way for the emergence of many AI chatbots recently. From students to industry experts, there are many active users all around the globe for their accurate and timely responses about almost every topic in the world. Amidst this trend, Pratik Desai, a computer scientist and founder of the agritech startup, Titodi, led the project to develop KissanGPT, a new AI chatbot, to bridge the information gap between farmers and experts by providing them with resources and resolving their queries to increase their profit.

The challenges faced by the Indian farming community

The start of civilization can be linked to agriculture. Only farmers can do magic in agriculture. India being the global agricultural powerhouse, there is a need to preserve the agricultural sector with emerging technologies like any other sector. According to India, more than 60% of the population is involved in farming, contributing to about 18% of the country’s GDP. For the past few decades, India’s agricultural sector has witnessed various challenges with the changes and advancements in farming approaches and techniques. Lack of accessibility towards arising technologies and less knowledge of new advancements create hindrances to further developments in the agricultural sector. One serious issue the farmers faces is the knowledge gap between them and the experts. Here, user-friendly chatbots like KissanGPT can be game changers for the agricultural sector in India. Moreover, this chatbot can be a true saviour for Indian farmers who are not much familiar with smartphones and gadgets.

What is KissanGPT?

KissanGPT is an AI chatbot that leverages the power of GPT 3.5 and the Whisper model exclusively for serving India’s underserved agricultural domain. Launched on March 15th 2023, KissanGPT has already earned the hearts of farmers all over the country with its remarkable ability to guide the farmers in irrigation, pest control and crop cultivation.

Being a person from an agricultural family, Desai finds himself responsible for leveraging his knowledge of AI to benefit Indian agriculture. “Recognizing the need for an AI voice assistant in the Indian agricultural sector, we focused on the prevalence of smartphones among rural populations, high levels of multilingualism, and the value of real-time, personalized farming advice”, Desai mentioned.

Though GPT4 has arrived and made its influence, according to Desai, in order to reduce the cost application, KissanGPT uses GPT3.5, which enables the agricultural community to be in touch with the AI technology at a lower cost, enabling wider scale impact and making the technology more accessible to farmers. He also opines GPT-4, being an advanced multimodal, has the potential to enhance KissanGPT’s capabilities further. “Its ability to process and generate better contextual information could provide even more accurate and personalized advice to farmers, making it a valuable resource in achieving our goals”, he added.

How does KissanGPT resolve the issues faced by Indian farmers?

Though technologies are sprouting day by day, the accessibility of such technologies among farmers is a serious issue that needs to be discussed. KissanGPT has made strides in overcoming this issue to an extent with its easily accessible AI-powered voice assistant that supports multiple Indian languages. “This ensures that even farmers with limited reading or writing abilities can access expert agricultural advice seamlessly”, says Desai.

According to him, KissanGPT can significantly help address some of the issues faced by Indian farmers, such as limited access to expert knowledge, language barriers, and lack of information for informed decision-making. Although they may not solve all problems, these technologies can make a meaningful impact on farmers’ lives.

Regarding the linguistic diversity in India, KissanGPT copes with language barriers by supporting nine Indic languages, including Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Bangla, and Hindi. In addition, Desai mentioned that they are also planning to add Assamese and Odia support in future. He believes this approach accommodates the diverse linguistic landscape of India and addresses language accessibility challenges farmers face.

Impact and future of KissanGPT

KissanGPT has received positive feedback from farmers, with organic communities of progressive farmers forming to help others learn how to use the platform. Desai pointed out that these farmers are spreading the word about KissanGPT and explaining its potential in their networks. “We have observed nighttime usage among farmers watering their fields, which is not feasible using traditional call-based approaches”, he added.

While talking about the reception of the KissanGPT among Indian farmers, he said, “An online farmers’ community from Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh reached out and invited me to their Clubhouse session. During this live event, over 450 farmers joined, shared their use cases, and provided valuable feedback. In another instance, a Twitter user mentioned witnessing someone using KissanGPT on a local train”. These instances highlight the effect of KissanGPT on the farming community.

Regarding the future of KissanGPT, Desai hopes to continually develop new features and improvements for KissanGPT, including personalized recommendations and market insights. He further added, “We will also strive to support more languages and refine the accuracy of our advice based on user feedback and the evolving agricultural landscape”.

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