At this year’s Global Fintech Fest, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Shri Shaktikanta Das announced the launch of several new-age innovations to enhance the utility of UPI (Unified Payments Interface). Along with UPI ATM, these announcements are in line with RBI’s recent monetary policies that are aimed at creating a robust digital payments ecosystem in India. To propel UPI innovation, RBI has now announced its plan to infuse UPI with conversational AI capabilities. Have a look at the details below.
Make UPI Payments Using Voice Commands Soon!
To better the reach and use of digital payments in India, NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India) is leveraging the potential of conversational AI. The feature dubbed Hello! UPI will soon let you use payment-specific voice commands to complete hands-free UPI payments. Though a privacy risk, you will even be able to enter your UPI PIN verbally!
These AI capabilities will see deep integration while making payments using telecom calls, as well as via IoT devices and UPI apps such as PhonePe, Google Pay, PayTM, and smart home assistants. To facilitate this, NPCI is using India’s own AI language model Project Bhashini, working closely with IIT Madras’ Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat to offer this service in Hindi and English at launch, with several other regional languages coming soon.
Apart from this, NPCI has also introduced a nationalized number dubbed “BillPay Connect” via its Bharat BillPay app. You can use this number to pay bills and receive payment reports by sending a simple “Hi.” And in case you do not own a smartphone, a simple missed call to the number will do the trick for you. This will trigger an automated callback that will verify your payment authorization.
Additionally, using the Voice Assisted Bill Payments facility of the Bharat BillPay app, you will be able to fetch and make hands-free bill payments by using AI-powered voice commands. Once successful, an audio confirmation for the same will be relayed to you. The same will be relayed to vendors while collecting payment using soundbox devices.
And this is not all! Some of the other noteworthy launches of the Global Fintech Fest 2023 include the ability to avail credit from banks via UPI, the launch of UPI Lite X for making and receiving offline payments, and the ability to Tap & Pay using UPI on NFC-enabled devices.
