Hyderabad: The Congress has been using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and big data analytics in the Telangana elections as part of its digital media strategy. The data analytics team has been using AI to collect information from karyakartas using the Shakti platform.
AI was used even to check if the Congress should ally with the Telugu Desam. In order to get an opinion from workers and voters on a large scale, questions were asked on the Shakti platform.
Karyakartas gave answers in Telugu, which were recorded, and other datasets were also used to get the opinion of voters in Telangana. Then the data analytics team used AI to convert voice to text in Telugu and then to English and then analyse and find out what those opinions were.
AI was also used to select candidates. Praveen Chakravarty, chairperson, data analytics department of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) said, “AICC has processes, tools and technologies that we use across India. Every state is welcome to use whatever in their own region. The Congress president was clear that we need to get opinions from workers and voters on a large scale. We used Shakti to get opinions from workers in Telangana. We analyse opinions about whether we should ally with the TD or not. Similarly, when candidates were chosen by the Congress party, we asked our party workers through Shakti about candidates for their constituencies and used AI to get their views.” He added that this served as one of the inputs.
In the Telangana elections, the Shakti platform is being extensively used to deliver personalised messages to karyakartas. On Wednesday, the karyakartas received a personalised video message from Sonia Gandhi wherein she was spelling out the name of the person and constituency about TS voting. This voice customisation was done using AI.
Apart from the Shakti app, traditional social media like WhatsApp and Facebook are being used. According to the Congress social media team, every day about 6,000 WhatsApp groups of karyakartas in TS receive five to 10 messages. Through WhatsApp alone the AICC is reaching out to 15 lakh people in one go in the state. Admin social media, Hasiba Amin, said, “TS has higher engagement on Facebook compared to Twitter. Videos are getting more engagement due to easy access to data. Most of our posts are organic (automatically-spread messages), but at least one really good post we pay and promote every day.
