Meet the Bangla ChatGPT – AlapChari
If you haven’t been living under a rock, you should be familiar with the name ‘ChatGPT’. This popular AI was officially released to the public on November 30 last year, revolutionizing what we knew as chatbots.
No longer limited to generating automated responses based on specific queries, chatbots like ChatGPT can now help with complex requests such as writing essays, preparing letters, and generating prompts for any topic. Its success has even prompted tech giants like Microsoft and Google to create their own versions of AI-based chatbots, with varying degrees of success.
However, while ChatGPT is still useful for overcoming writing blocks, it only works in English. A local Bangladeshi user, for example, may feel more comfortable using a Bangla version of a similar AI-run chatbot. That’s where AlapChari comes in – an AI-assisted chatbot that provides coherent responses to users’ questions, but in Bangla.
Launched as a preview version on February 20, AlapChari runs on the Chatrik engine, which functions as a layer on top of large language models like GPT-3 – the same language model used by ChatGPT.
Unlike ChatGPT, AlapChari does not currently store contextual information from previous conversations, so each new query is treated and evaluated as an independent request.
However, it is based on language models that can automatically translate while contextual learning from existing databases, allowing anyone to use the chatbot to generate responses to questions – as long as they are written in Bangla Unicode.
The catch? AlapChari is still in its early stages and can be unpredictable and unreliable at times due to hallucinations – a phenomenon common in large language models where the AI imagines something that doesn’t exist in reality.
Fahmidul Hasan, the creator of AlapChari, is a first-year student of CSE at United International University, with a passion for programming and machine learning. His vision for AlapChari is to empower people across Bangladesh with access to information and services more easily by breaking down language barriers.
His ultimate goal is to create a world where anyone can simply ask a question in Bangla and get an immediate answer, simplifying everyday life for everyone in Bangladesh. To achieve this, Fahmidul plans on making the chatbot more accessible for general users to train it with their own datasets.
If you’re interested in trying out this brand-new Bangla chatbot, you can check it out at http://chatrik.org/alapchari.
