Hello! 🙂 

Zen Citizen has reached a crucial juncture this month; with the launch of Spashta, our Gen AI chatbot, we are shifting focus from building content and tools to make government services more accessible, to actively driving awareness and user adoption. Up until now, we’ve primarily shared our work on r/bangalore.

Spashta v2 Launch: Why It’s a Game Changer

Spashta, which means ‘clarity’ in multiple Indian languages,  lives up to its name by capturing context and processing complex queries with empathy and accuracy. This tool also offers voice integration, supporting communication in both Kannada and English.

Crucially, Spashta takes the pressure off our volunteers, allowing them to focus on tasks beyond responding to citizen questions that come in through our website and forums like Reddit and Twitter. We’re currently piloting this for marriage registration services in Karnataka and are in the process of extending it to other government services we cover.

We’ve leveraged our core LLM to set up Spashta in multiple avatars:

• Browser Extension: This initiates a chat interface directly on Kaveri, the Karnataka Government’s revenue department’s portal. The browser extension is live on the Chrome Web Store and ready for public use. Thank you to our volunteers Priti Pandurangan (London), Chandru (Chennai), and Nikhil (Kochi) for their timely and diligent contributions.
• Integrated as a native chatbot into the Zen Citizen website on the marriage registration guide page. Thank you Gaius Kayiranga (Rwanda) for taking ownership
• We’ve also deployed Spashta as a WhatsApp bot. Thank you Rahul Gupta (Bangalore) for quickly building us a prototype! 

We are grateful to K (Chennai) for writing the prompts that power our LLM, Arpit Chhikara (Bangalore) for their invaluable feedback on the bot’s responses, and Prabhat Raju (Bangalore) for producing Spashta’s video demo.

These versions were inexpensive to build in terms of both cost and time, and we’re excited to see which ones resonate most with our users.

You can see Spashta in action here

Other news

Measuring Our Impact – Exploring Academic Collaboration

Alongside these efforts, we’re also taking steps to systematically measure the impact we’re having. We’ve reached out to academic departments specializing in the study of corruption, and we’re excited to be exploring potential collaborations with researchers from the Center for Corruption at the University of Sussex and the University of California, San Diego, who have both responded positively.

New Content: When Bureaucracy Meets Resolve – Mohan’s Story

We’ve published an article offering a real-world example of how Zen Citizen empowers individuals to navigate bureaucratic hurdles. It tells the story of Mohan, who, following our advice, reluctantly filed an RTI query after his marriage registration application was rejected. Remarkably, his application was approved within just two weeks of filing the RTI. Even more remarkably, Mohan also welcomed a new baby boy on the very same day!

Exploring collaboration with the Revenue Department of Karnataka

We’ve reached out to the Revenue Department of Karnataka to collaborate on getting timely clarifications. Our goal for Phase 1 of Zen Citizen is to complete coverage of all services offered on the Kaveri portal, ensuring a solid foundation with one department in one state before measuring its impact and extending to more departments and states.

Wish us luck as we roll out our awareness efforts for Zen Citizen this month!