AgriBot - An intelligent interactive interface to assist farmers in agricultural activities

Abstract

In India, agriculture plays a predominant role in economy and employment. The common problem existing among the Indian farmers today is that they fail to choose the right crop based on their region specications and yield history. Hence they face a serious setback in productivity. Agricultural statistics and forecast is an important resource that the government has not explored commensurate to its impact. The paper proposes an intelligent portable system using data mining and analytics which assists farmers with various farming techniques, helps them decide most suitable crops as per current climate conditions, soil conditions and geographical characteristics of the specified region.The farmers do not have a single source which can cater to all their queries regarding seeds, fertilizers, market prices, storage facilities, government schemes,etc. To make this data analysis easily accessible to the farmers a chatbot is proposed which uses the Natural Language Processing technique. It helps to get responses of the farmer input queries regarding agricultural context in audio format, so as to make farmer interaction more user friendly. If the system fails to answer any specified query, the query is redirected to helpline centers. The system basically works as a virtual, handy assistant to assist farmers throughout the year helping them stay notified of any factor that would affect crop productivity and profit. The responses are generated based on various machine learning algorithms modelled around data set. Though the main audience under consideration are farmers any other user can also use the system to get advice regarding activities related to agriculture.