A duo of recently launched artificial intelligence chatbots focused on the City of Milwaukee is showing how the technology can be used for an altruistic purpose at the local level.
Tarik Moody, program director for HYFIN and content producer/on-air host at
88Nine Radio Milwaukee, is the creator behind the
Cream City Concierge.
The chatbot,
accessible here, is designed to be a virtual guide to the city’s parks, government and more. Users can get information on everything from nightlife and dining to trash pickup schedules to how the city's sales tax increase impacts them. The chatbot was trained on nearly 11 million characters of data from various websites housing information on city services and amenities.
Moody cautioned, the chatbot’s responses will occasionally be imperfect. Each response includes citations that show where data was sourced.
[caption id="attachment_530680" align="alignleft" width="300"]
Tarik Moody[/caption]
Moody has been studying AI and large language models in his spare time and was searching for practical uses for the technology that would benefit the average person. He started by scraping data from Milwaukee’s latest city and county budgets, along with Milwaukee Public Schools’ budget, later creating a chatbot that housed that information. That chatbot is called the
Milwaukee Budget Brewmaster.
“I instructed it to respond in the tone of Bob Uecker, so when you get answers there will sometimes be little baseball expressions,” said Moody.
As he began looking into creating another chatbot platform, he learned New York City created its own AI action plan that will help build AI knowledge and skills among city government employees and responsibly implement AI-based tools.
“I thought Milwaukee was kind of behind the curve here,” said Moody. “That’s kind of the spirit of this. Trying to create case studies using AI to help people.”
Another reason Moody wanted to create the Cream City Concierge is the growing digital divide, referring to the gap between different demographics and regions that have access to modern technologies. He wants to make technology like AI a less scary, less nebulous concept for the younger generations.
“My attempt at building these chatbots could get people interested in this stuff,” he said. “The technology is moving fast and before long people will be too late to catch up.”
He hopes over time, he’ll be able to make the Cream City Concierge a more robust tool that could possibly garner Milwaukee some positive attention.
“You’ve got the Republican National Convention coming this year,” said Moody. “We’ve created this tool and I could see it as an opportunity to help people in the city and also get us some good press.”
