Climate-Smart Practices Become More Accessible for Farmers Through Farmer.CHAT

Generative AI startup Gooey.AI and global development organization Digital Green have come together to announce a revolutionary new product, Farmer.CHAT, to address the needs of farmers on the frontlines of climate change and water security. This service was developed in collaboration with the governments of India and Ethiopia, FAO, Microsoft, and Societal Thinking and recently featured at the 2023 UN General Assembly Briefing on “Science-based Evidence in support of Sustainable Solutions” (video link below).

Farmer.CHAT is a locally responsive farmer advisory service designed to facilitate real-time communication between governments and farmers on the frontlines of climate change and water security issues. It is a GPT4-based, multi-lingual artificial intelligence (AI) platform that empowers farmers and government extension agents with data-driven insights and decision-making tools to optimize crop management, reduce waste, and increase yields. The platform combines editable documents, thousands of best practice videos, agriculture call center transcripts and other vetted data sources to deliver real-time, actionable recommendations to Indian and Ethiopian farmers, helping them make informed decisions about planting, irrigation, fertilization, pest control, and more.

Farmer.CHAT serves as a virtual agronomist, providing personalized advice and guidance to farmers through an intuitive chat interface. Farmers can simply send a text (or audio) message on WhatsApp, Telegram or https://Farmer.CHAT, which analyzes their questions and responds in local languages with tailored recommendations based on the specific needs of their crops, location, and other contextual factors.

“The best source of information for farmers is other farmers,” said Rikin Gandhi, CEO of Digital Green. “Leveraging generative AI technology alongside our years of experience in creating accessible agricultural advisory content for millions of small-scale farmers across India, Ethiopia, Kenya — and beyond — has the potential to be life-changing for the productivity of not just millions of farmers, but hundreds of millions.”

“AI has the potential to aid the productivity of everyone,” says Gooey.AI’s Technical co-founder Dev Aggarwal. “In Farmer.CHAT, we’ve combined technologies like GPT and vector databases from Microsoft Azure OpenAI, speech recognition from Bhashini.in and the ease of use of Google Docs to create a simple WhatsApp conversational bot. Now, any government extension agent or farmer can type or talk in their own language and get clear answers with links to relevant Digital Green text and video content.” 

Farmer.CHAT is available now in English, Hindi, Telugu, Swahili and Amharic in India, Ethiopia and Kenya, with more languages and supported crops coming throughout 2023. 

Useful Links: