Context

• In order to resolve queries of railway passengers over the internet pertaining to various services offered, Indian Railways had introduced the services of Artificial Intelligence-based ASKDISHA chatbot in October 2018 for the benefit of the users.

ASKDISHA Chatbot:

• IRCTC had launched this chat bot to answer various queries about ticket booking, cancellation and various value-added services.
• The chatbot is a special computer programme designed to simulate conversation with users, especially over the internet.
• It was jointly developed by IRCTC and CoRover Private Limited, a Bangalore-based startup.
• The first-of-its-kind initiative by IRCTC is aimed at facilitating accessibility by answering users’ queries pertaining to various services offered to railway passengers.

About the new update?

• The ASKDISHA Chatbot was initially launched in English language but in order to further enhance the customer services rendered.
• To further strengthen the services of the chatbot, IRCTC has now powered voice-enabled ASKDISHA to converse with customers in Hindi language also in the e-ticketing site irctc.co.in.
• The customers can now ask queries to ASKDISHA in Hindi language by voice as well as text.
• On an average, around three thousand enquiries are being handled by ASKDISHA in Hindi language on daily basis and the figure is increasing day by day which also shows the acceptability of the new feature by the customer.
• IRCTC plans to launch ASKDISHA in more languages along with many other additional features in the near future.

Source:PIB