Digital India engages with citizens at scale to provide critical COVID-19 information using AI-enabled chatbot

Caring for a large population

Communicating with India’s population of 1.38 billion people is no small feat for its government. Digital India Corporation is an organization under the Ministry of Electronics and IT, Government of India, that makes services available online and aims to facilitate e-governance across the country. It offers digital services to citizens by enabling automation of back-end systems of government departments, providing citizens anywhere, anytime government services.

Digital India’s motto is “Power to Empower.” The agency took a big step in empowering citizens with consistent information when it launched the MyGov platform for citizen engagement in 2014. The citizen-focused platform helps people connect and interact with the government and hold a healthy exchange of ideas on topics that affect them.

When the COVID-19 crisis hit India, the agency quickly understood the need to make sure that individuals and businesses could easily get access to critical information about virus transmission, prevention measures, quarantine and lockdown protocols, and any government initiatives that were in place. Digital India and MyGov were using emails, phone calls, and social media presence to answer questions and needed to scale up its response to serve a large population in a personalized, user-friendly, and interactive way.

Easy-to-deploy bot solution

With the number of COVID-19 cases rising in the country, Digital India knew it needed to take action quickly. Accenture and Microsoft proposed a proof of concept (POC) for a chatbot solution using Power Virtual Agents to build a bot on the MyGov website. Digital India received technical support from Microsoft Power Virtual Agents Product group and Customer Advisory Team, working closely with the Accenture team to deliver the Power Virtual Agents bot. The agency was happy with the POC and decided to create a bot persona named MyGov Saathi, which means “friend” in Hindi. Built on Power Virtual Agents, the bot uses AI and natural language processing to understand customer questions and provide appropriate responses.

“From the day we had the first call with the Accenture team to going live was less than two weeks,” says Abhishek Singh, Chief Executive Officer of MyGov at Digital India. “At that time, citizen communication was our priority, and we had to do something in record time. I’m very grateful to Accenture, Microsoft, and my team for the collaboration and dedication to make this happen so quickly.”

The bot doesn’t just give short answers to questions—it directs residents to webpages with comprehensive information. Initially, the bot started in English, and now MyGov and Digital India have expanded the bot to Hindi and other regional languages so that it can reach more citizens in a personal, direct way. “Our chatbot has been deployed for more than six months, and it’s been quite easy to use, design, and reconfigure it to offer additional answers to citizen queries regarding various government initiatives,” says Singh.

Driving citizen adoption

Digital India met a clear need for up-to-date, easy-to-find information with the bot. Moreover, Saathi provides direct, personal answers at scale with no downtime. Currently, the bot has around 250,000 monthly users, and daily active sessions range from a few hundred to a few thousand, with total active sessions over a 16-day period nearing 600,000.

”Our engagement numbers went up significantly during the COVID-19 crisis, including interactions with the bot, emails, and calls,” says Singh. “The Power Virtual Agents bot has contributed immensely to our communication efforts to be direct and conversational, and helped divert the load from other channels.”

Digital India has observed a notable increase in the number of users registered on the MyGov platform. “Before February 2020, approximately 5,000 new users joined MyGov daily, and now that number has gone up to 16,000 new daily users,” says Singh. “Citizens have started regarding MyGov as a reliable source of authentic and most recent information about COVID-19.”

Increasing public health knowledge

With quick adoption of the bot, residents now find valuable answers to their personal questions about COVID-19 and the ever-evolving information on the risk of transmission from surfaces, treatments, the status of vaccine development, the proper way to quarantine, and more. Citizens come to Saathi for instructions on topics that affect them in the moment, such as lockdown and reopening and guidance about schools, workplaces, restaurants, parks, cinemas, and air travel.

Uplifting videos, infographics on inspirational success stories, and podcasts from influencers have made a positive impact on the lives of everyday citizens, especially the elderly, children, and working professionals. “We regularly update all relevant information on the back end so that residents know what to do,” says Singh. “The bot helps us provide clear dos and don’ts, bust myths, and fight fake news around COVID-19.”

Singh believes that awareness is the best way to ensure effective health measures and minimize the spread of the coronavirus. He says the country’s response is a combined effort from many agencies, residents, and especially frontline healthcare workers.

“The number of deaths per million people is very low in India so far,” says Singh. “We used the Power Virtual Agents bot to play a significant role in engaging citizens at scale and educating them on how to stay safe by providing real-time responses to their queries. The better we communicate, the more lives we save.”

A smart solution for future communications

Now that Digital India has Saathi in place, the agency can expand the bot beyond COVID-19 questions and add more scenarios to help with other government services. “We can customize the bot and make it even more powerful and versatile,” says Singh. “The technology is there—it’s just a matter of how we configure and use it. The Power Virtual Agents bot helps us empower citizens by giving them the ability to access the right information in a way that is natural and intuitive.”

Concludes Singh, “We believe in using AI tools responsibly to encourage transformation, inclusion, and effective citizen engagement. We recognize a lot of business potential and social value in using conversational AI to help solve problems in India and around the world.”

Find out more about Digital India on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.