Seeking To Address Passenger Queries, Railways Looks Towards Automated Chat Bots

With an aim to provide better responses to passengers’ queries, Indian Railways is now considering deploying automated chatbots to respond to frequently asked questions, reports The News Minute. A high level committee is being constituted to look into the implementation after a recent railway conference, with the Railways looking at a collaboration with either Microsoft or Oracle.

Chatbots, which are computer programmes that can respond to a pre-determined set of questions will be used to answer commonly asked questions such as train schedules, train routes, ticket availability, reservation statuses and more which are currently being answered wither using an interactive voice response system (IVRS) or an SMS-based system.

A senior railway officer said that the application can either be deployed using a laptop or mobile phone and can respond to either voice or text queries.

Apart from this, the Railways also responds to queries over micro-blogging site Twitter, a practice instituted by former Minister of Railways, Suresh Prabhu.