Taipei, May 3 (CNA) A presentation Friday on Taiwan’s self-built language model TAIDE, released commercially on April 15, showed the many fields it can be applied to, from language learning and agricultural knowledge searches to banking customer service.
The project to develop TAIDE, which stands for Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine, was initiated by the Cabinet-level National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) in April 2023 to create a foundational model for a traditional Chinese generative AI dialogue engine specifically for Taiwan.
The NSTC has collaborated with several institutions on the project over the past year, and a number of them appeared at Friday’s presentation in Taipei to promote the system and demonstrate some of its applications.
A team from the University of Tainan, led by computer science and information engineering professor Lee Chang-shing (李建興), developed, for example, a Taiwanese Hokkien-English AI chatbot for elementary and junior high school students based on TAIDE to learn the languages.
National Chung Hsing University, meanwhile, created an agricultural knowledge search engine called “Divine Farmer TAIDE” that can answer professional agricultural questions with citations, according to Fan Yao-chung (范耀中), an associate professor of computer science and engineering at the university.
He said the answers generated through “Divine Farmer TAIDE” are more “context-based and detailed” than an engine the team previously developed based on ChatGPT because the new model includes reports from Taiwan’s Ministry of Agriculture in its database.
An elementary student interacts with the TAIDE-based Taiwanese Hokkien-English chatbot developed by the University of Tainan’s research team at the TAIDE application presentation event in Taipei on Friday. CNA photo May 3, 2024