The National e-Governance Division (NeGD) is inviting proposals from AI firms for the development of a Conversational AI platform for the delivery of government services. This AI-enabled chatbot will be deployed on the UMANG (Unified Mobile Application For New-Age Governance) app of the central government. 

The official document released by Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology states: “The platform should be able to provide assistance with general tasks including but not limited to availing services of Government and available on UMANG platform such as registration, login, reset password, department and service related information, events, new launch, user help, FAQs, coming soon information etc.."

The UMANG Mobile app was launched by the Hon’ble Prime Minister in November 2017. Within a short period of its successful running, the app has bagged numerous awards in the e-governance category.

Envisioned along the lines of Alexa and Google assistant, the platform is to be powered with an NLP engine to enable intent recognition, context awareness, entity extraction, sentiment analysis etc.. Speech services such as Advanced Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text to Speech (TTS) are also sought on the platform.

The request for proposal states: "Platform should also have other Deep Learning capabilities which can be used by platform for discovery and recommendation of eligible schemes and services to the users of bots/applications." "Users should be recommended best-fit schemes and services available in the government domain based on his/her profile," it adds. 

The initial term of the project has been fixed at 4 years from the day of going live. 12 January 2021 is last date for pre-bid conference and 25 January 2021 is the last date for bid submission.