Sunshine Coast Council trains AI kiosk for in-person help

Sunshine Coast Council is tapping into an AI-enabled kiosk to handle in-person queries at its municipal centre via an Azure OpenAI service-powered avatar named ‘Laura’.

The avatar was built by Queensland-based Soulbotix using computer-generated imagery and trained on effectively a self-hosted version of ChatGPT’s large language model.

The council is now trialling the kiosk to answer resident questions at its centre in Maroochydore until May. 

The council said it used “diverse datasets” to train Laura, but did not specify these further when asked by iTnews.

“Laura can understand and respond to a wide variety of questions,” a spokesperson said.

“However, she is specifically programmed to answer general council enquiries, such as bin collection days, council office locations and reporting maintenance issues.”

The council said it initially commenced the trial of the kiosk in December as part of an effort to test its “effectiveness, acceptance and required technology”.

The trial is also exploring installation options and costs, the spokesperson added.

“Based on this, the council will decide on the avatar’s future use, locations and format,” the spokesperson added.