Microsoft introduces ‘Jugalbandi,’ an AI chatbot for rural India

Jugalbandi is often used in Indian classical music to describe a duet between two musicians who collaborate to create something new. Now, Jugalbandi has another meaning, an AI assistant for rural India from AI4Bharat, a government-supported initiative, using reasoning models from Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. Users can engage in a conversation with the chatbot, creating a duet of sorts, thus the name.

Jugalbandi can retrieve information on government programs and provide the information to the users in their local language. The chatbot is like a personalised agent that understands the user’s problem and delivers the right information, even if it is in some other language in a database somewhere. This AI assistant can be accessed through WhatsApp.