Solving Media Limitations, Slow Databases, & Unscalable Notification for a State Government

About the Client:

Samagra is a governance transformation firm dedicated to driving large-scale, positive change in India. They partner with top government leaders to diagnose complex problems, design data-driven solutions, and implement tech-enabled strategies for efficient, accountable governance.

About the Product:

Samagra Governance Consulting partnered with Auriga IT to work on three projects Nipun Bharat, Doubtnut & Diksha to  integrate bots, create new transformers enabling seamless mass communication and engaging conversations with teachers, students & other stakeholders. We used UCI – Unified Communication Interface that is an open source platform developed by Samagra Governance Consulting.

The Unified Communication Interface (UCI) is a modular and flexible communication platform designed to streamline government-citizen interactions. Key features include:

• Multi-channel chatbot support: UCI powers chatbots across WhatsApp, web UI, and mobile apps.
• Configurable behavior: Administrators can define custom questions and response flows, or create general-purpose chatbots using a simple form-based system.
• Microservices architecture: Allows for easy integration of custom functionalities (e.g., audio-to-text transformers).

Problem Statement

The existing system struggles to provide a seamless user experience.  Limited media support in chat, slow database speeds, a reliance on basic SMS notifications, and scalability issues hindered effective communication and collaboration as the user base grows, and they faced following challenges:

• Limited Media Support: The chat interface couldn’t effectively handle images, videos, or other rich media types.
• Slow Database Performance: Database queries were bottlenecking the system, leading to delays in chatbot responses and affecting the user experience.
• Unscalable Notifications: The existing SMS-only notification system couldn’t handle large user bases or complex notification logic.

Solutions

UCI, with its eight services (4 libraries, 4 Java microservices), handles WhatsApp queries. The inbound service retrieves messages, orchestrator checks user registration, and interacts with the transformer service for generating responses. Outbound services deliver responses back to users.

• Enhanced Media Support: UCI was configured to seamlessly display media within WhatsApp chats, leveraging existing ODK forms.
• Configurable Transformers: The transformer system was made configuration-driven, allowing for plug-and-play integration of new functionalities (e.g., adding a generic transformer  which calls third party APIs).
• Optimized Caching: A combination of Caffeine and Redis cache implementations drastically improved data retrieval speeds, enabling near-instant chatbot responses.
• Firebase Push Notifications: The system was integrated with Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) to deliver rich, asynchronous notifications via broadcast transformer. These notifications can even trigger specific chatbot flows.

Business Impact

The improvements to UCI had a significant positive impact on several large-scale projects:

• Diksha: A government platform utilizing UCI for school surveys. Now, teachers and students can easily participate in these surveys through a WhatsApp chatbot, streamlining data collection.

We significantly enhanced the Diskha user experience by adding:

• Rich Media Support- Users can send and receive questions and answers in image, audio, and text formats.
• Location-Based Attendance- The app now leverages location data to track student attendance accurately.
• Multilingual Chatbot- Users can interact in multiple languages, if supported in the uploaded form for improved  accessibility.

• Doubtnut: We created a UCI-powered transformer that delivers AI-driven answers to questions on WhatsApp. It utilizes Doubtnut’s resources and generative AI to provide clear, helpful responses, even when information isn’t readily available to students and teachers.
• Nipun Bharat:It is a resource platform for educators and our partnership with Samagra Governance Consulting enabled the government to seamlessly send bulk notifications to teachers, students, and all stakeholders. Using the same notification the user can start chatting with the bot.

Key Takeaways

• Broadcast transformer was able to achieve a 99% success rate reaching 2.5 lakh Disksha & Nipun Bharat users.
• Bots successfully served 100K+ users across Uttar Pradesh, Haryana & Andhra Pradesh.