Ahmedabad: Over 4,500 police personnel are heading to Ahmedabad from across Gujarat for this year’s Jagannath Rath Yatra on July 16. To handle the logistics, the Crime Branch built something new: a voice AI system that answers officers’ questions about where to go and what to do.
Rath Yatra draws big crowds every year, and big crowds mean big security deployments Ahmedabad’s own force plus reinforcements pulled in from other districts. Someone has to tell each of them where they’re staying, when meals are served, who they report to. That job has always landed on the Crime Branch, alongside their actual work of investigating crime and catching suspects. PSI Dilip Thakor didn’t dress it up much: answering duty-roster calls all day cuts into time meant for real police work.
The fix was a voice AI system built specifically for this event. Every officer’s name, phone number, duty post, accommodation, meals and reporting officer get loaded into the system in advance. Call the designated number from your registered mobile, and it already knows who you are. Ask where you’re staying, or who’s your reporting officer, and it just tells you.
Loading the data takes roughly 30 minutes. Training the system on it takes another hour to ninety minutes. It runs on a customized model built along similar lines to ChatGPT tuned for police department needs. They named it Rath Yatra Voice AI.
According to the Crime Branch, earlier chatbot experiments hadn’t worked well because they sounded stiff and mechanical. This one was built to hold something closer to an actual conversation. Every call starts with “Jai Jagannath,” then the AI runs through duty location, reporting officer and contact number. Trial runs are already done. Officials are betting it’ll cut into one of the more grinding parts of running Rath Yatra security every year.
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