Artificial Intelligence has entered the domestic market of India with its smart functionalities for smart cities, industries, smart homes, consumers, and many more. Consumers have started preferring artificial intelligence over traditional workloads or systems for time-efficient and cost-efficient features. This is about the urban cities of India where there is not digital divide and poor or no network connections. But, artificial intelligence in Indian small towns is thriving in recent years while these AI models are transforming the lives of people living in these small towns. Multiple AI-based start-ups are focused on developing different AI models for Indian small towns to enhance the standard of living. Let's dive deep into how artificial intelligence is transforming the Indian small towns efficiently and effectively.

These days everyone needs their machines to talk, and the only way by which a computer can communicate is through Natural Language Processing (NLP). Take the case of Alexa, a conversational item by Amazon. An inquiry is passed to it by the mode of voice, and it can answer by a similar medium, i.e., voice. The market situation of NLP is quite promising. The buzz of NLP in the market is increasing in an aggressive way which is expected to reach the mark of $ 16 billion by 2021 with the compound growth rate of 16 % yearly.

How ready is India for the world of artificial intelligence (AI)? This question is answered in one of the latest global lists researched and created by Oxford Insights and commissioned by Canada's International Development Research Centre. It is called the Government Artificial Intelligence Readiness Index. The just released index measures 194 countries on a scale of 1-10 on how ready their governments are to embrace and make use of a world dominated by artificial intelligence. At the very top of the list is Singapore with a score of 9.186 and at the bottom is Somalia which scores 0.168. This kind of ranking is critical to understand the adoption of a technology which has, famously, been described as the'next electricity' or as fundamental as electricity by Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera and former head of Google Brain.

Only 20 per cent of the 530 million Indian internet users consume content in English. According to a recent report by research and consulting firm RedSeer, 260 million Indian users are "monetizable". Nearly 210 million of these users, with an annual spending power of $300 billion, prefer digital content in vernacular languages. "India has added Internet users at 8X speed in the last 10 years driven by small towns and villages, not by large cities," the report stated. Most of such people used to go to an agent when they wanted to book a train ticket for their next Vaishno Devi trip with their family, wanted an instance plan and wanted someone to help them with a purchase.

SoftBank Group Corp.'s early-stage venture capital arm is setting up a second investment fund dedicated to unearthing promising startups in artificial intelligence, propelling founder Masayoshi Son's ambition of staking out a position in the nascent technology. Deepcore Inc. is preparing to form a new AI investment fund in two to three years as it expands its core startup incubation business, Chief Executive Officer Katsumasa Niki said in an interview. The company aims to find promising companies and nurture the next generation of up-and-comers, enroute to addressing Japan's deficit of global AI firms. Deepcore's second fund will surpass the 6 billion yen ($55 million) raised for the first, Niki said without elaborating. The effort is separate from SoftBank's much better-known Vision Fund, the $100 billion giant that has made large bets on industries from ride-hailing and autonomous driving to co-working spaces.

Self-driving cars are trained to be overly cautious, but there may be situations where they need to make high-speed maneuvers to avoid a collision. Can these vehicles, festooned with tens of thousands of dollars worth of high-tech sensors and programmed to drive at grandma-speeds, handle these split-second decisions like a human? Engineers at Stanford University may have the answer. They created a neural network that can enable driverless cars to perform high-speed, low-friction maneuvers just as well as race car drivers. When they eventually arrive, driverless cars will need capabilities beyond those of humans, as 94 percent of crashes are attributable to human error.

With an unprecedented increase in the number of people using messaging apps today, and the advancements in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies, the rise of chat bots seems to have been inevitable. Research shows that the number of people using chat apps has surpassed the number of those using social networking apps, which is believable yet surprising! Facebook Messenger claims to have recently hit the much coveted'billion' with 1.2 billion users on the platform. Last year, at Facebook's Developer Conference, F8, the support for bots on Messenger platform was unveiled. And since then, developers from around the world have been working to leverage the next-gen technology.

Indians living in Tier-2 cities are driving mobile penetration and represent largely untapped markets for many app developers. India is one of the app-friendliest countries around, having this year surpassed the U.S. with the highest number of downloads. However, while India's most popular apps largely cater to urban dwellers, there is a growing segment of Indians residing in smaller towns and cities that are responsible for the country's rapid internet growth. This became a focal point for four Indian entrepreneurs, who decided to develop a platform for users living in India's Tier-2 cities and towns that speak a variety of regional languages. The startup aims to be a one-app solution that will communicate with users in their preferred language and help to complete financial transactions.

Niki is the first and only fully-automated AI bot in India to handle end-to-end digital transactions. Talking about the concierge business of Niki, the process of discovering any service using recommendations based on your preferences becomes so convenient and simple on chat that even a grandmother can get her work done fast. That is what makes Niki stand apart from all other players – It is as easy as chatting with a friend. On the AI front, getting the AI bot (Niki) to understand the natural language of our users was a big challenge. This remains a big hurdle for all the players in the segment.

CHENNAI: Federal Bank & Niki.ai on Saturday announced the launch of a chatbot-based virtual assistant on FedMobile, the bank's mobile banking application. The bank has partnered with Niki.ai for powering the artificially intelligent bot. The chatbot feature offers mobile recharges, hotel room/ bus ticket reservation, household bill payments (electricity, water, DTH, data card, landline, broadband, gas), movie booking, events booking and cab booking. A user who wants to do a mobile recharge will simply have to type on the app "recharge my mobile number for Rs 100." The intelligent chatbot will pick up automatically the mobile number, identify the mobile operator and display the details for the user's confirmation.