Let’s take a quick trip down the memory lane. If you’re old enough to rewind four decades, you’d probably remember what an event it was to book a train ticket. For the uninitiated, here’s how it worked: people would queue up at the ticketing windows early in the mornings, much in advance of the travel date, and the booking clerks would be juggling registers of trains, manually entering all passenger details to make reservations. Though the process became computerised in the late 1980s – the pen and paper registers were replaced with computers for the booking officials – the queues duly remained. Any changes required in the booking also had to go through the same tedious process.

The new millennium brought in a sea change for railway passengers. Year 2002 saw the introduction of the online ticketing facility by Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC). The convenience of making train reservations with the click of a mouse was soon extended across the railway network. But how could any major tech advancement truly belong in the 21st century without the integration of Artificial Intelligence and its related ancillaries?

In October 2018, with the vision to make available instant, reliable and round-the-clock customer support without the need for a human agent, IRCTC deployed an AI and NLP enabled Intelligent Virtual Assistant. Thus, India’s first ever AI chatbot by a Public Sector Enterprise – AskDISHA – came into being.

We spoke to Ankush Sabharwal, Founder and CEO of CoRover, the conversational AI company that has built AskDISHA, to get some more information about their Chatbot-as-a-Service (CaaS) offering.

AskDISHA for railway queries 

AskDISHA bot is live on the IRCTC website and mobile app to provide quick replies and information to the passengers, by voice and text and in multi-languages. Built by CoRover using its proprietary cognitive AI technology, and powered by the Microsoft Azure architecture, AskDISHA is short for Digital Interaction to Seek Help Anytime. Users can either key in or verbally communicate their queries to get immediate resolution from this NLP-powered virtual assistant. The bot can understand both English and Hindi and has even been programmed to understand a mix of the two – Hinglish. 

The chatbot can answer user queries on ticket reservation, refund status, PNR search, cancellations, train running status, probability of ticket confirmation, as well as other travel and tourism offerings of the IRCTC. AskDISHA has also received the Asia Leadership Award for Innovation Using Technology 2019 for being the first chatbot for any government organisation in India.

AskDISHA handles about 150,000 passenger queries daily with 90% accuracy. In its 10 billion interactions so far, AskDISHA has helped nearly 178 million passengers. With 70% improvement in customer satisfaction, the results have been very encouraging. Owing to this highly efficient AI bot, queries across other channels like social media, phone calls and emails have been reduced by 70%. 

Challenges of building an NLP-powered chatbot for India

Ankush spotlights the three major challenges that were faced while building AskDISHA:

• Data: A lot of customer/call center data was available but in various structured and unstructured forms. This had to be appropriately interpreted to use in the machine learning models while training the bot.
• Language Diversity: The virtual assistant had to be trained to understand various dialects of the users, in various languages of India.
• Scalability: Getting 8 lakh+ concurrent users was a challenge, too.

The journey ahead

Following the success of AskDISHA, IRCTC has got into a GTM partnership with CoRover Pvt. Ltd. to co-sell and re-sell AI products and services (like AI chatbots, voicebots, videobots, virtual assistants, intelligent RPA, and more) to government and private organisations in India and abroad, across verticals & functions. 

Ankush informs that this partnership would make it easy and possible for IRCTC to pitch AI Virtual Assistants/Chatbots to other government organisations, hopefully without tenders as government-to-government deals can happen on nomination basis. This is aimed at letting other PSUs/government organisations know the power of having a conversational AI in their business and the impact it can make in changing lives through this innovative technology. As a result of this partnership CoRover can expand its clientele through IRCTC, and IRCTC will broaden its revenue share.

Image from Wikimedia Commons