The canton of Berne has launched a chatbot to provide visitors of their geoinformation portal and website access to information about cantonal geodata. From the announcement (in German / in French):
The chatbot provides quick and easy answers to your questions – whether you need help navigating the website, searching for specific geodata, or interpreting geometadata. The chatbot helps you find the information you need more quickly.
Note, this is not (yet?) a “talk to the map” solution, but a chatbot that can answer questions about the website and available data1. If I read the announcement right, the chatbot probably has access to all geoinformation-related web content as well as to the metadata2 of all cantonal geodata.
In my quick tests, the chatbot can answer questions posed in German, French, and in English (and likely many more languages; Turkish also worked okay, for example):
- “Welche Layer gibt es zu Wald?”
- “Vous avez les données RDPPF?”
- “What groundwater data do you have?”
A question in English yielded a German answer, for me. With German and French, the language of the answer mirrors the language of the question.
