DigiYatra, which facilitates paperless check-ins at airports for domestic fliers, could be expanded for passengers travelling outside India with the digital enrolment of passports in the pipeline.

“Today DigiYatra is available only for domestic travel and we want to get into the next stage, which is international travel. Our e-passport based enrolment is under prototype testing and that is happening as we speak and most likely by the end of this month or by mid of June, we should be having the new update,” said Suresh Khadakbhavi, CEO, DigiYatra Foundation, on Wednesday at the AWS (Amazon Web Services) summit in Bangalore.

Discussions are also underway with the Bureau of Immigration in India and international airports as well for making seamless travel services available to outbound fliers from India.

“We have started that journey and are talking with other countries. EU have got its own digital identity and that is something we would also want to leverage to see if we can do a prototype between the two countries,” said Khadakbhavi.

He added that pilot testing with hotel chains is also underway. Khadakbhavi also allayed user concerns relating to data privacy by adding that DigiYatra does not store user data.

Gen AI services

Amid rising demand among Indian corporates for deploying generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) services in their businesses, AWS on Wednesday said it has decided to offer its customers a faster and more secure way of building and scaling generative AI applications.

“The availability of Amazon Bedrock in AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region will support customers, including public sector organisations and companies in regulated industries, to innovate with generative AI and to have choices on where they can run and store generative AI applications.

“Deploying generative AI workloads closer to end users will also help customers with low latency needs. Low latency is especially important for generative AI applications in delivering faster processing and response times, which are essential for AI tasks such as on-the-fly content generation, interactive user experiences, and real-time conversational insights,” AWS said.

“The availability of Amazon Bedrock in India will further spur innovation that large enterprises, start-ups, independent software vendors, and public sector organisations are building, and complement their efforts to upskill their talent in generative AI,” said Shalini Kapoor, chief technologist – APJ Public Sector, director – AWS India and South Asia.