India's market watchdog has launched a virtual assistant named SEVA, an artificial intelligence-driven chatbot for educating investors. The chatbot, out in its beta version currently, is in line with the Securities and Exchange Board of India's mandate of investor protection.
According to SEBI, the chatbot is currently enabled to answer questions on general information on the securities market, the latest master circulars, the grievance redressal process, etc. "Based on the feedback received from the users, additional areas will be added to the chatbot," it said.
NDTV Profit took a demo of SEVA, which is built by BharatGPT, to explore its capabilities and guardrails.
Strict Guardrails Against Investment Suggestions
The chatbot has, very rightly, strict guardrails against any sort of investment advice.
We asked whether we should invest in a certain mutual fund, and it said it didn't understand the query because it's in beta mode. But going ahead as well, we expect it to give an answer in the same region of non-specificity.
It, however, did reply to our question on the safest investment one can make in the stock markets.
It suggested fixed deposits, postal savings certificates, money market mutual funds and short-term debt mutual funds as the safest bets.
Here's some more sound investing advice:
Hallucinations
The chatbot does tend to hallucinate, but that's a given since it's in beta mode, and many that have launched fully also tend to cook up answers. Such can be the nature of artificial intelligence.
Here's SEVA's reply to a simple question on what it can answer reliably.
The chatbot comes coded with lots of pre-loaded questions that pop up with suggestions, with most being around grievances and how users can quickly report mishaps or raise complaints via SCORES, SEBI's in-house platform.
"This is a beta version of the chatbot SEVA, released as an experimental version for seeking feedback and identifying areas of interest in the securities market for investors," a disclaimer by SEBI reads. "The chatbot also employs LLM/generative AI (genAI) for generating responses to some of the queries of users; accordingly, some of the responses provided by SEVA may not be accurate."
The beta version of the chatbot is available on SEBI's investor website and the SAARTHI mobile apps on both Android and iOS.
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