research-article

FarmChat: A Conversational Agent to Answer Farmer Queries

Authors:

Pratyush Kumar,

Ishita Bhansali,

Shwetak PatelAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, Volume 2, Issue 4

Article No.: 170, Pages 1 - 22

https://doi.org/10.1145/3287048

Published: 27 December 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Farmers constitute 54.6% of the Indian population, but earn only 13.9% of the national GDP. This gross mismatch can be alleviated by improving farmers' access to information and expert advice (e.g., knowing which seeds to sow and how to treat pests can significantly impact yield). In this paper, we report our experience of designing a conversational agent, called FarmChat, to meet the information needs of farmers in rural India. We conducted an evaluative study with 34 farmers near Ranchi in India, focusing on assessing the usability of the system, acceptability of the information provided, and understanding the user population's unique preferences, needs, and challenges in using the technology. We performed a comparative study with two different modalities: audio-only and audio+text. Our results provide a detailed understanding on how literacy level, digital literacy, and other factors impact users' preferences for the interaction modality. We found that a conversational agent has the potential to effectively meet the information needs of farmers at scale. More broadly, our results could inform future work on designing conversational agents for user populations with limited literacy and technology experience.

Supplementary Material

jain (jain.zip)

Supplemental movie, appendix, image and software files for, FarmChat: A Conversational Agent to Answer Farmer Queries

Download
19.05 MB

References

[1]

2017. Plantix: Grow Smart. (2017). Retrieved Apr 18, 2018 from https://plantix.net/

[2]

Jodi Aronson. 1994. A pragmatic view of thematic analysis. The Qualitative Report 1 (1994), 1989--1991.

[3]

Sayantan Bera. 2014. Farm distress calls hit record high but many go unanswered. (2014). Retrieved March 2, 2018 from http://www.livemint.com/Politics/rUUCn9kKYklCORPcEtGkVM/Farm-distress-calls-hit-record-high-but-many-go-unanswered.html

[4]

James Bigelow and Amy Poremba. 2014. Achilles' ear? Inferior human short-term and recognition memory in the auditory modality. PLoS One 2 (2014), 1--8.

[5]

Christopher Blattman, Robert Jensen, and Raul Roman. 2003. Assessing the Need and Potential of Community Networking for Development in Rural India Special Issue: ICTs and Community Networking. The Information Society 19, 5 (2003), 349--364.

[6]

David M. Blei, Andrew Y. Ng, and Michael I. Jordan. 2003. Latent Dirichlet Allocation. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 3 (March 2003), 993--1022. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=944919.944937

[7]

Susan E Brennan. 1990. Conversation as direct manipulation: An iconoclastic view. (1990).

[8]

E. Brewer, M. Demmer, B. Du, M. Ho, M. Kam, S. Nedevschi, J. Pal, R. Patra, S. Surana, and K. Fall. 2005. The case for technology in developing regions. Computer 38, 6 (May 2005), 25--38.

Digital Library

[9]

Karen G. Cheng, Francisco Ernesto, and Khai N. Truong. 2008. Participant and Interviewer Attitudes Toward Handheld Computers in the Context of HIV/AIDS Programs in sub-Saharan Africa. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '08). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 763--766.

Digital Library

[10]

Cooperation and Department of Agriculture Farmers Welfare. 2017. Annual Report. (2017), 1--188.

[11]

Sebastien Cuendet, Indrani Medhi, Kalika Bali, and Edward Cutrell. 2013. VideoKheti: Making Video Content Accessible to Low-literate and Novice Users. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2833--2842.

Digital Library

[12]

Andy Dearden, Paul Matthews, and Haider Rizvi. 2011. Kheti: mobile multimedia in an agricultural cooperative. Pers Ubiquit Comput (2011), 597--607.

Digital Library

[13]

Leah Findlater, Ravin Balakrishnan, and Kentaro Toyama. 2009. Comparing Semiliterate and Illiterate Users' Ability to Transition from Audio+Text to Text-only Interaction. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1751--1760.

Digital Library

[14]

BJ Fogg and Hsiang Tseng. 1999. The elements of computer credibility. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 80--87.

Digital Library

[15]

R. Gandhi, R. Veeraraghavan, K. Toyama, and V. Ramprasad. 2007. Digital Green: Participatory video for agricultural extension. In 2007 International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development. 1--10.

[16]

Ministry of Agriculture Govt of India. 2004. Kisan Call Centre. (2004). Retrieved March 2, 2018 from http://www.dackkms.gov.in/Account/aboutus.aspx

[17]

Ministry of Home Affairs Govt of India. 2016. Data on Language. (2016). Retrieved Nov 17, 2017 from http://www.censusindia.gov.in/Census_Data_2001/Census_Data_Online/Language/data_on_language.aspx

[18]

A. S. Grover, M. Plauche, E. Barnard, and C. Kuun. 2009. HIV health information access using spoken dialogue systems: Touchtone vs. speech. In 2009 International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD). 95--107.

Digital Library

[19]

Orange Hive. 2017. First time bot users deserve good bots. (2017). Retrieved Jan 5, 2018 from https://unfiltered.orangehive.de/first-time-bot-users-deserve-good-bots/

[20]

Tianran Hu, Anbang Xu, Zhe Liu, Quanzeng You, Yufan Guo, Vibha Sinha, Jiebo Luo, and Rama Akkiraju. 2018. Touch Your Heart: A Tone-aware Chatbot for Customer Care on Social Media. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 415, 12 pages.

Digital Library

[21]

Ting-Hao (Kenneth) Huang, Joseph Chee Chang, and Jeffrey P. Bigham. 2018. Evorus: A Crowd-powered Conversational Assistant Built to Automate Itself Over Time. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13.

Digital Library

[22]

Mohit Jain, Ramachandra Kota, Pratyush Kumar, and Shwetak Patel. 2018a. Convey: Exploring the Use of a Context View for Chatbots. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 6.

Digital Library

[23]

Mohit Jain, Pratyush Kumar, Ramachandra Kota, and Shwetak Patel. 2018b. Evaluating and Informing the Design of Chatbots. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 12.

Digital Library

[24]

Jiepu Jiang, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Rosie Jones, Umut Ozertem, Imed Zitouni, Ranjitha Gurunath Kulkarni, and Omar Zia Khan. 2015. Automatic Online Evaluation of Intelligent Assistants. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW '15). International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland, 506--516.

Digital Library

[25]

Konstantinos Kazakos, Siddhartha Asthana, Madeline Balaam, Mona Duggal, Amey Holden, Limalemla Jamir, Nanda Kishore Kannuri, Saurabh Kumar, Amarendar Reddy Manindla, Subhashini Arcot Manikam, GVS Murthy, Papreen Nahar, Peter Phillimore, Shreyaswi Sathyanath, Pushpendra Singh, Meenu Singh, Pete Wright, Deepika Yadav, and Patrick Olivier. 2016. A Real-Time IVR Platform for Community Radio. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 343--354.

Digital Library

[26]

Hendrik Knoche and Jeffrey Huang. 2012. Text is not the enemy-How illiterates use their mobile phones. In NUIs for new worlds: new interaction forms and interfaces for mobile applications in developing countries-CHI 2012 workshop.

[27]

Hendrik Knoche, Pr Sheshagiri Rao, HS Jamadagni, and Jeffrey Huang. 2015. Actions and Advice in Coli: A Mobile Social Network to Support Agricultural Peer Learning. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services Adjunct (MobileHCI '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1191--1198.

Digital Library

[28]

Brij Kothari, Joe Takeda, Ashok Joshi, and Avinash Pandey. 2002. Same language subtitling: a butterfly for literacy? International Journal of Lifelong Education 21, 1 (2002), 55--66.

[29]

Q. Vera Liao, Matthew Davis, Werner Geyer, Michael Muller, and N. Sadat Shami. 2016. What Can You Do?: Studying Social-Agent Orientation and Agent Proactive Interactions with an Agent for Employees. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 264--275.

Digital Library

[30]

Vera Q. Liao, Muhammed Masud Hussain, Praveen Chandar, Matthew Davis, Marco Crasso, Dakuo Wang, Michael Muller, Sadat N. Shami, and Werner Geyer. 2018. All Work and no Play? Conversations with a Question-and-Answer Chatbot in the Wild. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13.

Digital Library

[31]

J. C. R. Licklider. 1960. IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics HFE-1 (March 1960), 4--11.

[32]

Ewa Luger and Abigail Sellen. 2016. "Like Having a Really Bad PA": The Gulf Between User Expectation and Experience of Conversational Agents. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5286--5297.

Digital Library

[33]

Indrani Medhi, Somani Patnaik, Emma Brunskill, SN Gautama, William Thies, and Kentaro Toyama. 2011. Designing mobile interfaces for novice and low-literacy users. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 18, 1 (2011), 2.

Digital Library

[34]

Indrani Medhi, Aman Sagar, and Kentaro Toyama. 2007. Text-free User Interfaces for Illiterate and Semiliterate Users. Inf. Technol. Int. Dev. 4, 1 (Oct. 2007), 37--50.

Digital Library

[35]

Indrani Medhi-Thies, Pedro Ferreira, Nakull Gupta, Jacki O'Neill, and Edward Cutrell. 2015. KrishiPustak: A Social Networking System for Low-Literate Farmers. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1670--1681.

Digital Library

[36]

Preeti Mudliar, Jonathan Donner, and William Thies. 2012. Emergent Practices Around CGNet Swara, Voice Forum for Citizen Journalism in Rural India. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 159--168.

Digital Library

[37]

Government of India. 2017a. mKisan. (2017). Retrieved March 2, 2018 from https://mkisan.gov.in/Default.aspx

[38]

Press Trust of India. 2017b. Govt to prepare roadmap for doubling farmers income by 2022. (2017). Retrieved Apr 18, 2018 from https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/agriculture/govt-to-prepare-roadmap-for-doubling-farmers-income-by-2022/articleshow/62951252.cms

[39]

Kweku Opoku-Agyemang, Bhaumik Shah, and Tapan S. Parikh. 2017. Scaling Up Peer Education with Farmers in India. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 15, 10 pages.

Digital Library

[40]

Neil Patel, Sheetal Agarwal, Nitendra Rajput, Amit Nanavati, Paresh Dave, and Tapan S Parikh. 2009. A comparative study of speech and dialed input voice interfaces in rural India. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 51--54.

Digital Library

[41]

Neil Patel, Deepti Chittamuru, Anupam Jain, Paresh Dave, and Tapan S. Parikh. 2010. Avaaj Otalo: A Field Study of an Interactive Voice Forum for Small Farmers in Rural India. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 733--742.

Digital Library

[42]

Filip Radlinski and Nick Craswell. 2017. A theoretical framework for conversational search. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Conference Human Information Interaction and Retrieval. ACM, 117--126.

Digital Library

[43]

Waleed Riaz, Haris Durrani, Suleman Shahid, and Agha Ali Raza. 2017. ICT Intervention for Agriculture Development: Designing an IVR System for Farmers in Pakistan. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 33, 5 pages.

Digital Library

[44]

Ameneh Shamekhi, Q. Vera Liao, Dakuo Wang, Rachel K. E. Bellamy, and Thomas Erickson. 2018. Face Value? Exploring the Effects of Embodiment for a Group Facilitation Agent. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13.

Digital Library

[45]

J. Sherwani, S. Palijo, S. Mirza, T. Ahmed, N. Ali, and R. Rosenfeld. 2009. Speech vs. touch-tone: Telephony interfaces for information access by low literate users. In 2009 International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD). 447--457.

Digital Library

[46]

Sujit Shinde, Divya Piplani, Karthik Srinivasan, Dineshkumar Singh, Rahul Sharma, and Preetam Mohnaty. 2014. mKRISHI: Simplification Of IVR Based Services For Rural Community. In Proceedings of the India HCI 2014 Conference on Human Computer Interaction (IndiaHCI '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 154, 6 pages.

Digital Library

[47]

Didem Tali. 2015. India's Rural Farmers Struggle to Read and Write. (2015). Retrieved March 2, 2018 from https://www.good.is/articles/agricultural-apps-bridge-literacy-gaps-in-india

[48]

Indrani M Thies, Nandita Menon, Sneha Magapu, Manisha Subramony, and Jacki O'Neill. 2017. How do you want your chatbot? An exploratory Wizard-of-Oz study with young, urban Indians. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) (INTERACT '17). IFIP, 20.

[49]

Statistics Times. 2017. Sector-wise contribution of GDP of India. (2017). Retrieved March 2, 2018 from http://statisticstimes.com/economy/sectorwise-gdp-contribution-of-india.php

Cited By

Liu XLi Y(2025)Examining the Double-Edged Sword Effect of AI Usage on Work Engagement: The Moderating Role of Core Task Characteristics SubstitutionBehavioral Sciences10.3390/bs1502020615:2(206)Online publication date: 13-Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.3390/bs15020206
Sai SKumar SGaur AGoyal SChamola VHussain A(2025)Unleashing the Power of Generative AI in Agriculture 4.0 for Smart and Sustainable FarmingCognitive Computation10.1007/s12559-025-10420-617:1Online publication date: 4-Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-025-10420-6
Cibrian FChen YAnderson KAbrahamsson CMotti V(2025)Limitations in speech recognition for young adults with down syndromeUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-025-01197-4Online publication date: 15-Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-025-01197-4
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

FarmChat: A Conversational Agent to Answer Farmer Queries
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Artificial intelligence
    1. Distributed artificial intelligence
      1. Intelligent agents
2. Human-centered computing
  1. Interaction design
  2. Ubiquitous and mobile computing

Recommendations

Mobile Mandi: Towards an Accessible Agricultural Market Information Service for Low-Literate Users
ICTD '22: Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development

The provision of agricultural market information has demonstrated potential to improve the incomes of smallholder farmers who comprise over 80% of India’s agricultural population. The scarcity of accurate price information, however, leads farmers to ...
Understanding is a Two-Way Street: User-Initiated Repair on Agent Responses and Hearing in Conversational Interfaces
CSCW

Although methods for repairing prior turns in natural conversation are critical for enabling mutual understanding, or successful communication, these methods are seldom built into conversational user interfaces systematically. Chatbots and voice ...
Representing participation in ICT4D projects

How do the discourses of participation inform deployment of information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D)? Discourses here mean narratives that assign roles to actors, and specify causes and outcomes for events. Based on the theory ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies Volume 2, Issue 4

December 2018

1169 pages

EISSN:2474-9567

DOI:10.1145/3301777

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 27 December 2018

Accepted: 01 October 2018

Revised: 01 August 2018

Received: 01 May 2018

Published in IMWUT Volume 2, Issue 4

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed limited

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

87
Total Citations
View Citations
1,110
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)107
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)10

Reflects downloads up to 03 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Liu XLi Y(2025)Examining the Double-Edged Sword Effect of AI Usage on Work Engagement: The Moderating Role of Core Task Characteristics SubstitutionBehavioral Sciences10.3390/bs1502020615:2(206)Online publication date: 13-Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.3390/bs15020206
Sai SKumar SGaur AGoyal SChamola VHussain A(2025)Unleashing the Power of Generative AI in Agriculture 4.0 for Smart and Sustainable FarmingCognitive Computation10.1007/s12559-025-10420-617:1Online publication date: 4-Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-025-10420-6
Cibrian FChen YAnderson KAbrahamsson CMotti V(2025)Limitations in speech recognition for young adults with down syndromeUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-025-01197-4Online publication date: 15-Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-025-01197-4
Silva JRonceros CMansilla-Lopez J(2025)Smart Chatbot for the Optimization of the Use of Natural Resources in Agricultural ProductionAdvanced Research in Technologies, Information, Innovation and Sustainability10.1007/978-3-031-83435-6_10(126-138)Online publication date: 5-Mar-2025
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-83435-6_10
Chaitra CUpadhyay PChakraborty D(2025)Is ChatGPT Ready for Indian-Language Speakers? Findings From a Preliminary Mixed Methods StudyHuman-Computer Interaction. Design and Research10.1007/978-3-031-80829-6_9(193-214)Online publication date: 14-Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-80829-6_9
T. J. MS. J. KH. M. HG. G. MJ. N(2024)MkulimaGPT: Equitable AI Use Via a Swahili Chatbot for Maize Farming System in TanzaniaAfrican Journal of Agriculture and Food Science10.52589/AJAFS-VERNTB5I7:4(172-188)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.52589/AJAFS-VERNTB5I
Nuwarapaksha TUdumann SDissanayaka NDilshan RAtapattu A(2024)AI-Driven Solutions for Sustainable IrrigationIntegrating Agriculture, Green Marketing Strategies, and Artificial Intelligence10.4018/979-8-3693-6468-0.ch001(1-32)Online publication date: 26-Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.4018/979-8-3693-6468-0.ch001
Balyan SJangir HTripathi STripathi AJhang TPandey P(2024)Seeding a Sustainable Future: Navigating the Digital Horizon of Smart AgricultureSustainability10.3390/su1602047516:2(475)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/su16020475
Arakawa RLehman JGoel M(2024)PrISM-Q&A: Step-Aware Voice Assistant on a Smartwatch Enabled by Multimodal Procedure Tracking and Large Language ModelsProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36997598:4(1-26)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3699759
Agarwal DShahid FVashistha A(2024)Conversational Agents to Facilitate Deliberation on Harmful Content in WhatsApp GroupsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36870308:CSCW2(1-32)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3687030
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Issue’s Table of Contents