Citizen services on the government’s Unified Mobile Application for New-age Governance (Umang) app will soon be available just by using voice commands, as reported by ET.

The one-stop platform to access pan India e-governance services will be made available through a voice-enabled interface like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, after the government shortlisted conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) firm Senseforth.ai to extend voice functionality to the Umang app.

This means downloading your vaccination certificate, booking vaccination slots, checking your pension amount, tracking scholarship status, searching for medicines or Jan Aushadhi medical stores, viewing your provident fund passbook or tracking EPFO claim status, can all be done through voice-activated commands.

The feature recently went live on the website for about 13 citizen services, including E-Raktakosh, EPFO, Jan Aushadhi, ESIC (Employees' State Insurance Corporation), National Scholarships, AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education), CoWin, and Atal Pension Yojana.

In fact, numerous other features will soon be added to the app's journey toward conversational AI-driven citizen services going forward.

“Governments around the world are going on the digitalization journey and potentially a huge part of the dreams of people could be left out if they don't access the citizen services that are provided on digital platforms,” Shridhar Marri, co-founder and chief executive of Bengaluru-based Senseforth.ai told ET.

“Conversational AI is one way to address this by using local language input through voice or text, and then providing the same level of service without them having to actually use a mobile app or go to a website,” Marri added.

The feature will be available in English and Hindi initially and would be extended to about 10 major Indian languages in the next 6-8 months, he said.

During the pilot launch, over 500,000 users interacted with the text-based virtual assistant asking over one million questions. The voice feature will be enabled with the actual rollout, he said.