Skill Ministry Launches AI Chatbot For Upskilling In Partnership With Meta, SarvamAI

The Union skill development ministry (MSDE) has launched an AI chatbot on WhatsApp, in partnership with social media giant Meta and homegrown GenAI startup SarvamAI, to expand access to digital skills. 

Called Skill India Assistant (SIA), the AI-powered “digital skills mentor” is available on messaging platform WhatsApp. It offers personalised assistance in English, Hindi, and Hinglish. 

Developed in partnership between Meta and National Skills Development Corporation (NSDC), the project has been implemented by SarvamAI. The AI chatbot is powered by Meta’s open-source large language model Llama, the ministry said in a post on X. 

It offers skill guidance and access to job opportunities to the youth of the country. 

“SIA is designed to equip the youth with localized skill guidance and access to job opportunities, empowering them to build strong, future-ready careers. Aligned with the vision of “AI for All”, this is a key step toward an inclusive, technology-driven future where our youth lead the way,” the ministry said in a post on X. 

A quick interaction with the bot revealed that the platform offers course recommendations and doubt clarifications, course quizzes, skill centre recommendations and job listings. Users can chat with the bot via voice notes or text messages. 

It offers a wide variety of courses spanning sectors such as entrepreneurship, AI, information technology, banking, agriculture, among others.

The SIA chatbot can be accessed on WhatsApp by sending a message to +91 8448684032.

India Embraces AI

The new offering comes at a time when the Centre has been rapidly embracing AI and embedding the new technology in various digital public infrastructure (DPI) to spur the delivery of public goods. 

Earlier this year, the IT ministry launched a slew of new portals, including IndiaAI Compute platform, IndiaAIFutureSkills initiative, IndiaAI startup financing, IndiaAI innovation centre, IndiaAI datasets platform, among others. 

In addition, the ministry is also working on the Digital India Bhashini initiative to offer AI-driven language technology solutions in all 22 scheduled Indian languages to enable citizens to access digital services in their vernacular languages.

The Bhashini platform also hosts more than 350 AI-based language models spanning automatic speech recognition, machine translation, text-to-speech, optical character recognition, among others, covering 17+ language services.

In addition, the Centre has tied up with Meta to establish the Center for GenAI, Srijan at IIT Jodhpur. The government has also launched a slew of initiatives and capacity building measures to upskill youth in AI technologies, boost research capabilities and foster the development of a thriving indigenous AI ecosystem. 

As part of this, the IT Ministry, earlier this year, floated a proposal to build an Indic LLM. Of the 67 proposals in the first phase, SarvamAI was chosen to helm the project and received computing resources to build the AI model.