Artificial Intelligence-based ASKDISHA chatbot is developed to resolve queries of railway passengers over the internet pertaining to various services offered by IRCTC
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 of the ticketing website http://www.irctc.co.in and tourism website http://www.irctctourism.com of its PSU, Indian Railways Catering & Tourism Corporation Limited (IRCTC).
The ASKDISHA Chatbot was initially launched in the English language but to further enhance the customer services rendered and to further strengthen the services of the chatbot, IRCTC has now powered voice-enabled ASKDISHA to converse with customers in the Hindi language also in the e-ticketing site http://www.irctc.co.in. The customers can now ask queries to ASKDISHA in the Hindi language by voice as well as text.
On average, around three thousand inquiries are being handled by ASKDISHA in the 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.
The chatbot is a special computer programme designed to simulate conversation with users, especially over the internet. 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. Since its initial launch, more than 150 million passengers have been benefited from ASKDISHA with 10 billion interactions for seeking help on a reservation of tickets, cancellation, inquiry of refund status, fare, PNR search, train running status, inquiry about retiring rooms, and tourism products.
Source: Press Release Release ID: 1603955 Date: February 21, 2020 PIB Delhi Ministry of Railways