TouristAssist

Team Name

GTYouths

Team Members

Project Description

SUMMARY

TouristAssist is an all-in-one AI assistant for tourism in Northern Territory. It leverages Northern Territory-specific-data of events, attractions, locations, parks, territory stories, cultural books, images, services, restaurants, hotels, tours, etc. It is an interactive app for tourists to effectively explore and find information and to enhance their cultural experience.

PROBLEM

With the overwhelm of information and data across multiple digital and physical sources from information centres, social medias, to official websites, it is challenging for tourists to effectively explore and find the right information on the go for their visit in Northern Territory.

APPROACH

We have tried to implement a solution that brings available datasets from official sources in Northern Territory into one place. Significantly, not like other solutions which are simply a dump data centre that leaves users to swimming alone in that data lake, we apply advances in AI technologies to provide the users an interactive app. The app works as an assistant (we call it TouristAssist) that can answer the user's questions about places, events, attractions, accommodations, tours, restaurants, cultural stories, local services, public transportation, culture stories, books, etc in Northern Territory. TouristAssist can also follow up and recommend activities and questions that the user may be interested. This can help the user to explore/engage further relevant information or activities that they may not know otherwise. We believe that our solution will help to enhance tourists' experience which in turn will attract more visitors and boost tourism in Northern Territory.

TouristAssist is different from Google search or ChatGPT that TouristAssist uses official datasets which are specific to the domain of tourism in Northern Territory. So, its responses are more reliable, specific, relevant, and up-to-date.

FEATURES

• User can ask questions (in any language) or select a question from the recommenced list.
• TouristAssist will respond in the language used in the question in real-time.
• The response cannot just in formatted text, but it can also include images and links. This can be fun and intuitive for the user.
• TouristAssist uses the current position of the user when it answers the questions (if the user permits it to obtain the user’s location).
• TouristAssist is mobile-device friendly.

HOW DID WE IMPLEMENT IT?

With our technical skills in AI, data extraction, and software development, we started the project with an open-source generic AI model which had no data about tourism in Northern Territory. We have customised the AI model to accepts the types of tourism data we will feed into it. We explored available tourism APIs and websites provided by Northern Territory (see the datasets section) to determine and choose the datasets, webpages, and PDF files. We started feeding the datasets and adjusting the AI model accordingly. Once tested locally successfully, we deployed it on a remote server with a domain name to make it available to the public.

LIMITATIONS

The ability of the AI model depends on the datasets we provided to it. With the limited time given in this contest, we could only test with a couple of datasets available at hand. Hence, TouristAssist is limited its answers to these datasets. If there was more time, we could conduct a user acceptance survey to validate the approach and the responses of the AI model. Based on the survey results, we can find the gaps and make improvements accordingly.

FUTURE IMPROVEMENTS

• Integrate with Text-to-Voice and Voice-to-Text API to support voice interactions.
• Integrate with more datasets when they become available.
• Integrate TouristAssist as a chat-bot into existing Northern Territory tourism websites.
• Manage user sessions to provide context-aware and personalised interactions.
• Adjust the app to become a help-desk assistant for staff in Information Centers that helps the staff to quickly find the answers for visitor's questions.

CONCLUSION

AI application is an irresistible trend, especially in the age of overwhelm of information. With its nature, the tourism industry can greatly take advantage of AI technologies. This project has implemented and proved a workable/feasible solution along this direction. We hope that this project has switched on the light that the Northern Territory government may be interested to invest more on this direction. We are available to make improvements for the app on request from the Northern Territory government. Thank you very much for giving us this opportunity to apply our expertise to solve a real challenge. Thank you very much the GovHack's organisers and sponsors. We believe that everyone had enjoyable experience throughout this event.

Data Story

With the limitation of the time, we use the 3 following datasets as the samples to train our AI model. Note that, our AI model is not limited to these datasets, we can add more relevant datasets into the model once we have validated the datasets for their relevance and make sure they do not contract/noise the existing datasets.

1. Visit the Northern Territory site - https://northernterritory.com/

northernterritory.com provides an API to access data about local places, services, events, accommodations, tours, etc... in Northern Territory. We use this API to get relevant data and feed them into our generic AI model.

For examples of the API calls:

https://api.northernterritory.com/v1/map => retrieve a list of local places, services, events, accommodations, tours, etc...

https://api.northernterritory.com/v1/map?id=56b273bed5f1565045db6850 => retrieve details of a particular record from the list above.

1. Territory Stories - https://territorystories.nt.gov.au/

This website provides a rich of materials (books, images, etc) which tell cultural stories about Northern Territory. We use the API (https://territorystories.nt.gov.au/api/search) provided by the website to query for cultural stories in books, images, articles, etc. We then feed the data into our AI model to enrich its knowledge base.

1. Services in Northern Territory - https://digitalterritory.nt.gov.au/showcase/digital-portals/territory-services

This portal provides information about public services in Northern Territory. We feed the HTML-format contents of the services webpage to our AI model. We also feed our AI model with the PDF files found on the portal about other services such as interpretation services. Basically, we can feed our API model any webpages and PDF files which contain information that we would like the AI model to capture and learn.

Team Resources: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1mxcUmKXTn49Sgw4WsGl0UU6O31QyHr7q