December 25, 2024
Krutrim AI Chatbot Rolls Out in Public Beta: How to Test the Chatbot
Krutrim AI has been launched to the public and now anyone can try out the newest artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot. The founder of the startup, Bhavish Aggarwal took to X (formerly known as Twitter) to announce that the platform was being rolled out as a public beta and is now available to a wider user base.

Krutrim AI is rolling out to users as part of a public beta, allowing users to try out the newest artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot. Krutrim Si Designs — commonly referred to as Krutrim — Founder Bhavish Aggarwal took to X (formerly known as Twitter) to announce that the new AI chatbot was being rolled out as a public beta and is now available to a wider user base. Like other generative AI-based chatbots, it can answer queries, write essays, suggest recipes, and converse with users.

Announcing the rollout, Aggarwal said in a post on Monday, “This is a start for us and our first-generation product. Lots more to come and this will also improve significantly as we build on this base. Do give us your feedback.” While he did warn users to expect some AI hallucinations (a phenomenon where large language models (LLMs) create false or non-existent information), he was quick to add that it will be “much lower for Indian contexts than other global platforms” and that the company is working to fix them. At launch, the chatbot supports English and more than 10 Indian languages including Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Kannada, Gujarati and others. It also supports Hinglish.

Gadgets 360 tried the new Krutrim AI chatbot after it was rolled out on Monday. It is fairly easy to get access to the service — you can visit the official website here and register for an account to use it. Interestingly, the platform asks for users’ mobile numbers and only supports Indian numbers at the moment. That means you cannot open an account using email, which is possible on ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Google’s Gemini chatbots.

The chat page has a visual appearance that resembles most generative AI chatbots. However, in our experience, we found the page to be quite sluggish. Typing to scrolling through the page was slow and the navigation was occasionally broken. The response generation time was also comparatively slower than ChatGPT and Gemini, and users may have to wait a little before the answers pop up. We saw the tendency of the AI to respond in shorter blocks of text instead of multiple paragraphs and bulleted texts.

Another thing we noticed was that the contextual memory of the chatbot is quite low. In some instances, it could not even remember the context of the previous question when asking a follow-up query. This did not always happen, but whenever it did, it was frustrating. Further, the platform has often been touted as an India-centric chatbot that better understands the culture and context. We found this to be true as it was able to provide better answers even when asked about small villages in India. ChatGPT struggled with this, although Gemini’s performance was quite consistent.

This leaning also resulted in a couple of instances of AI hallucinations in our testing. When asked “Why is India the best country in the world”, both ChatGPT and Gemini responded along the lines that the concept of ‘best’ is subjective and depends on personal preferences. Meanwhile, Krutrim said, “India is often considered the best country in the world due to its rich history, diverse culture, and large population. As the world’s largest democracy, India has a strong political system and a well-developed infrastructure. The country is also known for its diverse and flavourful cuisine, with a variety of tastes that contribute to its unique identity. India’s economy is growing rapidly, and it is expected to become the world’s second-largest economy by 2075.”

The startup says that it has built a family of LLMs including the base Krutrim service and Krutrim Pro, the latter of which is claimed to be a multimodal foundational model. The models have been trained on over two trillion Indic language tokens, according to the company.


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