Jugalbandi: Building with AI for social impact

Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

Thoughtworks

Careers, Business, 907234, Technology

4.7 • 53 Ratings

🗓️ 30 November 2023

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's easy for key industry players to talk up AI's potential positive social impact, but what does building for social impact actually look like? At Thoughtworks, a small team has been working on a project called "Jugalbandi," designing AI-driven systems and tools for civil society initiatives, such as a chatbot that helps Indian citizens find information about government programs and schemes in their native language. Earlier this year, Jugalbandi caught the attention of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who saw it as evidence of AI's power to drive transformative change to every single part of the world.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Jugalbandi team members Vinod Sankaranarayanan and Prathamesh Kalamkar offer an inside look at the project, talking in detail about the work they've done, some of the challenges they've faced and how they're looking to expand and increase its impact in the months and years to come.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone. My name is Rebecca Parsons. I'm one of your co-hosts for the ThoughtWorks Technology podcast. And I'm joined today by my colleague Ken.
0:18.4	Hi, I'm Ken McGrage. I'm one of the other regular hosts of the podcast.
0:22.9	And we're joined by two of our colleagues who have been involved in a fascinating project
0:28.2	that we'll be talking about.
0:31.2	So the first one is the Node.
0:34.1	Hi.
0:34.7	Good to be here.
0:35.7	I'm Beno.
0:36.2	I lead digital public goods and infrastructure work out of ThoughtWorks India.
0:40.3	And Prathamas.
0:42.3	Hi, I'm Pratamish Karamkar.
0:43.3	I'm a lead data scientist at ThoughtWorks India.
0:46.3	Glad to be here.
0:47.3	Thank you.
0:48.3	So the project that we want to talk about is kind of an umbrella project called Jugal Bondi.
0:57.0	And first, I want to congratulate you all on the fact that this has been accepted into the Digital Public Goods Alliance.
1:06.0	That's something that we are quite excited about. But can you tell us what Jugal Bandi is about, where the name came from, and how this piece of work has come about?
1:24.6	Hi.
1:25.6	So the name is very interesting.
1:28.3	The name originates from actually Indian classical music.
1:32.3	So in the classical music, we have this concept that two artists are playing together,
1:38.3	and they're lead artists, not one on the percussion, but there are two artists and then they're playing some thoughts.
	...

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