Using Chatbots to Answer Farmer Queries in India

The researchers developed a knowledge base for potato farming using the KCC dataset and information collected from formative interviews with smallholder farmers and agri-experts. For each of the identified topics, they asked the two agri-experts (who participated in the Formative Study) to provide examples of typical farmer questions, the follow-up questions that they would ask in order to understand the problem, and the final advice they would provide.

All such conversations was added to the IBM Watson Conversation dialogue flow, and the informational advice was included in the FarmChat knowledge base. In the current version, the knowledge base is a SQL database consisting of four tables, one for each of the topics they identified above.

The Audio-only FarmChat interface consists of only two buttons:

A red ‘microphone' button that the user needs to click to provide speech input,
A blue ‘play' button, which enables the user to listen to the chatbot's last response again.