The Reserve Bank of India announced new Unified Payments Interface (UPI) features on Thursday. The recent changes can revolutionize the online payment method that will also allow transactions through a conversation with an AI system. 

RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das announced these measures while sharing the outcome of the central bank’s bi-monthly policy review. The central bank held the key repo rate steady at 6.5 per cent. 

 The RBI will be adding three new features for offline UPI payment. They have proposed to enable ‘conversation payments’ on UPI using AI-powered systems. Users will soon be able to ask an AI-powered system to make payments for them. However, further details on this functionality haven’t been disclosed yet. The feature will initially be available in Hindi and English. 

 The feature will be available on both smartphones and feature phones-based UPI channels. It will be made available in more Indian languages later. Introducing AI to UPI payments is a futuristic idea to incorporate developing technologies into existing technologies. 

As the second feature, the RBI has raised the transaction limit of UPI Lite to Rs 500 from Rs 200. Launched by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) in September 2022, UPI Lite allows quick small-value transactions by optimizing bank processing resources, thereby reducing transaction failures. 

It allowed users to conduct transactions of up to Rs 200 a day without needing a pin code, which reduced the transaction time. While the transaction limit has been raised to Rs 500, the UPI Lite balance ceiling has been left unchanged at Rs 2000 to contain the risks associated with the relaxation of two-faction authentication. 

The RBI Governor also announced offline UPI payments using near-field communication (NFC) technology through UPI Lite. This will make payments easier, as users only have to tap their smartphone on the point-of-sale (PoS) machine.