Putin commented on the use of AI in processing direct line appeals

On December 11, on the sidelines of the AI Journey international conference in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin commented on the processing by artificial intelligence (AI) of applications that citizens send to the direct line.

"It is clear which questions we need to prepare for, which ones are the most: quality and availability of housing, transport infrastructure, medicine, government agencies and organizations, benefits," the head of state said after seeing a ready-made cross-section of this year's questions.

The GigaChat neural network created by Sber is used for processing. It processes audio and video calls, SMS, appeals through the website and social networks. Thanks to the work of the service, it is possible to see the most popular topics of Russians' appeals. This is the first experience of using AI for a direct line.

A representative of the company told the President that GigaChat has greatly accelerated the processing of appeals, because they come in millions, and before even 16 thousand volunteers could not quickly sort out all the requests. More than half of the requests are answering machine recordings; previously they were analyzed after the live line, but thanks to the neural network this year they were processed on the fly - immediately after they were received.

The quality of speech recognition in GigaChat is at the level of a human operator and even higher. This is necessary for the model to work correctly and quickly. In three seconds GigaChat creates a transcript of the call and indicates the gender, age and region of the citizen, this information is stored in the database.

In addition, according to a representative of Sber, the neural network distributes calls according to a classifier. Previously, when they were sorted out manually, about a quarter of requests were sent to an undefined section, because sometimes it is really hard to say exactly what topic the person referred to. GigaChat, on the other hand, was able to identify the topic in all the requests. Putin, looking at the rubric chart, noticed that almost 30% of the requests were about social services and protection.

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For the first time, artificial intelligence was used to process citizens' questions

Earlier in the day, AI specialist Mikhail Voitko told Izvestia at the call center of the People's Front headquarters that requests are accepted around the clock, and there are such centers in other Russian regions as well. The topics parsed by the neural network are displayed in real time on a large screen at the headquarters.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on the same day that more than 300,000 citizens had already submitted requests for a direct line with Putin. A rating of 10 problems that worry Russians most of all has been formed.

The direct line of the head of state will be held on December 19, it will be combined with a large press conference. The events will be held under the title "The results of the year with Vladimir Putin". Invitations were received by representatives of Western media and foreign journalists accredited in the Russian Federation. Call-center in the headquarters of the "People's Front" began work on the night of December 8.

The previous direct line with the Russian leader was held on December 14, 2023. The President received more than 2 million appeals from citizens. He answered questions about Russia's special military operation in Ukraine, new regions of the Russian Federation, the growth of real wages, pensions, life expectancy, health care, development of artificial intelligence, and also touched on a number of other topics.