Transportation officials in Taipei and New Taipei City are testing whether artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to answer people’s questions about bus services.
The two cities in August last year launched a one-week trial using an AI chatbot, dubbed “Bus Station Master Ah-Ming (公車站長阿明),” at Taipei City Bus Hall Station, Banciao Bus Station, Taipei Railway Station and Tamsui MRT Station to answer frequently asked questions from bus passengers.
To access the service, passengers can use dedicated machines or scan a QR code. Transportation officials said they subsequently refined the service based on feedback from more than 300 users. Phase 2 of the trial began yesterday at 20 selected bus stops, where passengers can scan a QR code and ask their questions through voice or text input. Transportation officials said that they hope to receive more feedback from people who access the service using English.
Photo: CNA
The system is not available in other languages.
Despite a low semantic recognition accuracy rate, transportation officials said they are expanding the database and would make other languages available depending on the demand.
Officials said they would look into making the service available in Hoklo, commonly known as Taiwanese, once a mature, domestically developed large language model exists.
Mandarin as spoken in Taiwan would be recorded and used for optimization, they said, adding that Phase 3 of the trial is scheduled for April.
Passengers accessing the service would not be asked to provide personal data, bank account numbers or passwords, join online groups or open a different Web page.
The 20 bus stops were chosen as they are locations where bus drivers are often asked questions. In Taipei, passengers can scan the QR code in the bus stops at Taipei City Hall (westbound), Daan MRT Station (westbound), Ximen MRT station (northbound and southbound), Nanjing Fuxing MRT station (westbound), Minquan W Road MRT station (eastbound), Minquan Road and Zhongshan Road intersection (eastbound), Taipei Arena (southbound), Taipower Building MRT Station (northbound) and National Taiwan University Hospital (northbound).
In New Taipei City, the locations include Tamsui MRT Station (southbound), Luzhou MRT Station (northbound), Fu Jen University MRT Station (westbound), Yongning MRT Station (northbound), Qizhang MRT Station (northbound), Banciao Bus Station (Platform 1, northbound), Linkou Transit Center (Platform 1, northbound), Civic Plaza (eastbound), En Chu Kong Hospital (westbound) and Xizhi (eastbound).
Asiatek Inc (華夏科技), which designs the chatbot, said that the system would interact with users in dialogues, instead of simply saying that users’ queries are invalid. Users can also request further information on the potential travel arrangements, it added.
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