BECA teaches IBM Watson to speak Samoan.

Auckland-based engineering firm Beca is trialling a new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot called ‘Tala’, which will allow Samoan language speakers to give voice to their opinions in public consultations.

An AI powered agent named Tala may open the door on a new way of measuring sentiment and getting feedback from one of New Zealand’s ethnic minority communities. 

Developed and designed by Beca, one of Asia Pacific’s largest advisory, design and engineering consultancies, The Talanoa Project is a pilot project that used IBM’s artificial intelligence virtual agent solution Watson to interact in real time in Samoan for public consultation and community engagement.

“We decided to trial Watson for public consultation because we wanted to see if there was a better way of getting responses in community engagement efforts from communities where English is a second language, and from cultures where it’s not traditional to provide feedback to Government organisations,” says Matt Ensor, Business Director and Project Lead for conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) at Beca.

For more information visit BECA or https://talanoa.beca.ai