Manila residents will soon have their concerns and complaints directly addressed by Mayor Francisco “Isko Moreno” Domagoso and city officials with the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) brought in by Google Philippines and Senti AI.
The partnership between the City of Manila and AI pioneer Senti AI with Google Philippines seeks to utilize artificial intelligence for a real-time city grievance desk that will be launched by the second quarter of the year 2020.
Mayor Isko Moreno signed on February 7, 2020, a memorandum of agreement with the two companies for them to provide the needed platform for the Manila Public Information Office (MPIO) to mechanize the processing of public complaints in the city, among them:
- petty crimes
- infrastructure issues
- traffic
- inquiries towards official declarations like class suspensions
To do this, a Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine made by the Philippine company Senti AI will review complaints and identify key elements, such as place, date, and time, and will then display them on the dashboards of the office/officer to be alerted:
- Manila Public Information Office
- offices in the city hall
- Mayor Isko Moreno
The system is deemed to be more effective than menial manual review of multiple complaints through Google Forms.
This will also allow point persons like the mayor to take an easy cursory glance through the dashboard for real-time city review. Mayor Isko said that they needed immediate action on matters like city issues. “Bawal ang tamad sa Maynila,” he said during the signing of the agreement.
Senti AI utilizes artificial intelligence to allow machines to understand ever-changing Philippine languages and culture, which they utilize in marketing services to make communication between customers and businesses easier. This utilizes the aforementioned NLP, which is an artificial intelligence that learns languages through machine learning, where machines learn and improve with no human intervention.
Senti AI expressed excitement at the prospect of working with other local government units, saying, “Imagine how such a platform can help other cities.”
Senti AI previously hosted the Machine Learning Hackfest, during PH Startup Week 2019, which held the objective to find technological ways to help agriculture and nature conservation in our quickly industrializing country.
Senti AI is a proud product of academic research and was started in De La Salle University. Another startup from DLSU is the Contactless Apprehension of Traffic Violators, or CATCHALL, system; which observes and detects a myriad of traffic violations and their perpetrators.
Google Philippines has been proactive in helping startups and communities thrive in the digital era and among its initiatives were the adding of more Filipino languages to the Google Word Lens and the first Google News Initiative in the Philippines.
SEND WELL WISHES in the comments below to the people of Manila, Senti AI, Google Philippines for this noteworthy collaboration to address the people’s concerns!
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