SINGAPORE - Having trouble booking a badminton court? It could soon be as easy as telling a chatbot when and where you want to play badminton.
The People’s Association (PA) and the Government Technology Agency of Singapore have collaborated on onePA Facilities Booking Recommender, a tool that allows users to find available badminton courts and other PA facilities simply by typing in their preferred venue and dates in any of the Republic’s four official languages.
The tool, which will also recommend nearby facilities to provide users with more options, will initially be trialled with community centre reception desk staff.
It is just one of the generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) solutions developed as part of an initiative to accelerate the adoption of the technology here.
After the AI Trailblazers initiative was announced in July 2023, 84 businesses and government agencies here have developed more than 100 GenAI solutions.
The initiative is a collaborative effort between the Communications and Information Ministry, Digital Industry Singapore, the Smart Nation Group and Google Cloud.
It aims to help organisations here use GenAI to solve real-world challenges, with government agencies and businesses gaining free access to Google Cloud’s AI toolsets for up to three months under the initiative.
Another solution, developed by Nanyang Polytechnic (NYP), uses AI to guide academic staff through the process of developing course content, such as teaching slides, allowing the school to offer new or updated courses more quickly for adult learners.
A total of 43 organisations, whose GenAI solutions were developed under the initiative, were highlighted during the Explore AI summit, held at Google’s Asia-Pacific campus at Mapletree Business City on Jan 29.
During the summit, Google Cloud South-east Asia managing director Mark Micallef announced an expansion of the initiative, dubbed AI Trailblazers 2.0, which aims to help up to 150 more organisations here.
“The sheer variety of GenAI solutions that have been developed through AI Trailblazers reinforces this technology’s ability to help us make sense of the information and perform daily tasks in ways never before possible,” said Mr Micallef.
Organisations under the expanded initiative will be able to use new tools such as Gemini – a new multimodal large language model developed by Google – as well as Duet AI for Developers, an AI-powered tool that helps developers build applications faster.
This comes after Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong in December announced the revised National AI Strategy, which focuses on ways to get the Singapore economy to embrace and utilise AI, and expand on use cases within sectors such as healthcare and education.
Also announced during the summit were a slew of other programmes aimed at expanding the adoption of AI here.
They include a collaboration between Google Cloud and Enterprise Singapore that aims to grow 100 “high-potential” AI start-ups over the next three years and allow them to expand into new markets.
In line with efforts to grow the AI skills of the Singapore workforce, Google also announced that it is offering an additional 3,000 Google Career Certificate scholarships locally, bringing its total commitment to 13,000 scholarships here.
Focused on upskilling mid-career professionals, the certificates are in areas such as cyber security and data analytics. These scholarship programmes can be completed within six months through flexible online training.
In line with the Government’s aim to triple the number of AI practitioners here to 15,000 over the next three to five years, NYP will become the first institute of higher learning in Singapore to incorporate advanced industry training programmes from Google Cloud into its core curriculum.
This will benefit more than 1,000 full-time diploma students in its School of Information Technology, with programmes including professional data engineer certification and courses on building and deploying AI solutions on Vertex AI, Google’s machine-learning platform.
Minister for Communications and Information Josephine Teo, who attended the event, said part of good governance in AI is partnering others to build the capabilities needed to support the sector.
“It means making sure that people not only have access to the tools, but are provided with the opportunities to grow the skills that will enable them to use these tools well,” said Mrs Teo.
