Accenture develops AI-enabled conversational digital persona to promote art

Accenture and the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP), a private art museum based in Bengaluru, have entered into a collaboration to create a digital experience to engage art enthusiasts.

Accenture Labs, through its Tech4Good initiative, combined advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) with human-centred design and will create India’s first conversational digital persona to help visitors have a more engaging experience. With this, visitors to the museum will be able to have a lifelike conversation with the persona in the display, as per Accenture.

To create the digital persona, Accenture Labs used techniques such as face superimposition and speech synthesis, which are based on deep learning and generative AI models. Natural language understanding, natural language processing, and emotion detection technologies help ensure the conversation between the user and the persona. It also enables the digital persona to be as responsive, expressive, proactive, and adaptive as a real person would be, the tech major said.

Abhishek Poddar, founder-trustee, Museum of Art & Photography said, “One of our objectives is to create a museum-going culture that engages younger generations, as we have much to learn from our shared histories. A great way for museums to accomplish this is to harness technology to create engaging interactions that enable the user to learn something new and have fun in the process.''

According to Rekha M. Menon, chairperson and senior managing director, Accenture in India, the future need creative thinkers—people who can reimagine and reinvent. Creative arts foster a plurality of thought, helping people approach real-world problems more holistically.

``We are excited to team with a cultural institution like MAP and use our market-leading digital capabilities to broaden the appeal of visual arts among today’s digital native youth,'' she added.

MAP is the custodian of a growing collection of over 18,000 artworks, predominantly from the subcontinent and dating from the 10th century to the present. It will launch a digital version of the museum this month while its flagship physical space will come up in 2021.