New Brunswick’s tourism department officially unveiled a new artificial intelligence chatbot to help tourists plan their trip here.
It’s not without growing pains, as several obvious errors appeared in the bot’s answers in its early days of operation. The company that created it said this is to be expected at the start and is easily fixable.
It’s really about meeting visitors where they are and where they want to find their information, said San Francisco-based Matatdor Network.
But the errors made by Explora, the chatbot, are nearly identical to those from the previous Progressive Conservative government.
On Friday, Public Safety Minister Robert Gauvin rose in the legislature and criticized Tammy Scott-Wallace, the former tourism minister from the Blaine Higgs government.
Two years ago, Scott-Wallace’s department worked with companies that ran tourism ads in Europe that featured simple factual errors about the province.
“She said that Saint John was the biggest city in New Brunswick, that it was the capital of New Brunswick. She talked about the Cherry Brook Zoo. The problem with the zoo? It’s been closed for five years!” Gauvin said in French.
However, the Liberal government Gauvin is part of had just officially launched its own tourism advertisement of sorts, featuring the same exact mistake, plus many more.
Experimenting in its first few days of operation, the chatbot made several mistakes including a claim that Saint John is the province’s largest city.
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