Thai organisations collaborate to develop AI-powered chatbot for multiple sectors

Thai artificial intelligence (AI) engineers from public and private organisations have joined forces to create a Thai-language generative AI-powered chatbot, which is set to benefit various sectors such as education and business. The National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (Nectec) revealed its partnership with the Artificial Intelligence Entrepreneur Association of Thailand (AIEAT), the Artificial Intelligence Association of Thailand (AIAT) and the NSTDA Supercomputer Center (ThaiSC) to launch the OpenThaiGPT project.

Generative AI, which can interact with users in natural language and generate data including articles and multimodal content, gained popularity after the success of the ChatGPT chatbot, developed by San Francisco-based AI lab OpenAI, in November. The OpenThaiGPT project aims to harness the power of AI to develop, modify, and fully utilise the Thai language.

Nectec’s AI Research Group director Thepchai Supnithi highlighted the importance of Thailand becoming a technology producer, rather than just a user in the field of generative AI. The OpenThaiGPT project is crucial for enabling dynamic information retrieval and a user-friendly interface, and the chatbot is being developed on an open-source basis and will be distributed for free.

Thepchai explained that the chatbot is capable of tasks such as question and answer, machine translation, step-by-step explanation, paraphrasing, and coding suggestions. It uses publicly available data, while also taking into account data privacy and copyright concerns. AIEAT president Kobkrit Viriyayudhakorn noted that the project can be connected with external systems, easily expanded or customised, and integrated with other applications.

Potential use cases of OpenThaiGPT include chatbots, news summaries, automatic translation, and document classification. To ensure the trustworthiness of the project, safety measures, transparency, accountability and governance are the main considerations.

In recent years, as AI has played a more significant role in various work functions, businesses have started recognising the importance of the “augmented intelligence” concept, where AI is designed to help enhance humans’ work and capabilities rather than replace them, reports Bangkok Post.