Smart Sathi — Bangladesh's AI Chatbot Layer on the National 333 Helpline

Bangladesh's National Helpline 333 launched on 12 April 2018 under Aspire to Innovate (a2i), the government's digital-transformation unit within the ICT and Cabinet Divisions, with institutional support from UNDP. It gives citizens a single free number for government information, service applications and grievance redress, a significant channel given UNDP's estimate that over 60% of the population lacks reliable internet access.

On 18 October 2023 the government inaugurated Smart Sathi, a generative-AI conversational bot layered onto the helpline's existing voice and non-voice channels on a trial basis, aiming to extend round-the-clock automated coverage and reduce load on live agents who otherwise handle every call.

UNDP's five-year retrospective, published for the helpline's April 2023 anniversary — before Smart Sathi's launch — recorded 84 million calls received and over 40 million people served, at roughly 25,000 calls a day with 8,000-10,000 handled directly. The largest categories were food and relief aid (16.4 million calls) and health inquiries (10 million), including an estimated 2.5 million families given food assistance during the COVID-19 pandemic. These figures describe the helpline as a whole; no independently published data yet isolates Smart Sathi's own containment rate, accuracy or user satisfaction since its 2023 trial launch.