SINGAPORE – The Asian Civilisations Museum now has a chatbot run by artificial intelligence (AI) as a tour guidebook.
Named Allie, the digital assistant leads end users of the museum’s web site by a virtual reproduction of its Jewellery gallery.
Allie and the electronic gallery are 1 of two tasks jointly unveiled by the Countrywide Heritage Board (NHB) and the Infocomm Media Improvement Authority (IMDA) on Monday (Nov 22).
The challenge is a collaboration amongst the museum, AI-answers developer Taiger and spatial data business Matterport3D.
People can enter the virtual gallery for cost-free by way of the museum’s web site.
At the time within, they can entry Allie’s services, which contain an choice to be guided via the gallery.
But end users can also select to investigate the gallery freely by transferring between the displays, which are displayed in the similar placement and site as their actual physical counterparts.
Some artefacts in the gallery also have white circles following to them which, when clicked, activate a pop-up text box with details about the exhibits.
Guests can also inquire Allie inquiries about the gallery or the museum, these types of as “What is the oldest object in the gallery?”
Taiger’s head of authorities business Jaron Ong advised The Straits Periods that there are talks to expand the challenge to other galleries in the museum.
“Apart from that, we are also looking at the Malay Heritage Centre as the subsequent website to get the job done on,” he added.
The other task declared on Monday is a facial recognition and information analytics method that tracks physical people via cameras.
Designed by tech company Trakomatic, it is at present remaining trialled at the museum.
While the details collected does not have a guest’s identify or other personalized info, visitors can also sign-up a profile with the method to obtain personalised suggestions of reveals they may possibly be intrigued in.
These are dependent on knowledge analysed by the method, these types of as the time used by a guest at displays through former visits.
How the visitor will acquire the suggestions – no matter if as an SMS or other sorts of textual content messages – is continue to currently being decided, mentioned Trakomatic’s co-founder and chief procedure officer Shaun Kwan.
Mr Kwan also said the system will help the museum in creating choices, such as improving upon the structure of the galleries for superior customer targeted traffic to specified reveals.
Trakomatic’s challenge is the result of NHB’s collaboration with IMDA to digitalise Singapore’s heritage sector, through the authority’s crowdsourcing initiative referred to as Open Innovation Platform.
Other ongoing initiatives involving NHB include the improvement of a digital concierge option with local commence-up Vouch SG, and a digital tourism option with tech firm Revez Movement.
NHB’s chief facts officer Mohamed Hardi said the digitalisation attempts are not meant to replace physical museum visits.
Alternatively, these are intended to entice company to make return visits and increase the actual physical viewing experience.
“We nevertheless want people today to come and check out,” he reported.