Jono Thomson

Taiwan News, Staff Writer

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — National Chengchi University (NCCU) received a visit from OpenAI on Friday (Aug. 23) and scholars were shown a demonstration of the company’s latest ChatGPT product speaking in Mandarin Chinese with a Taiwanese accent.

OpenAI’s Asia Pacific public policy Director Sandy Kunvatangarn visited NCCU for the demonstration and a discussion about AI, per CNA. During the demonstration, Kunvatangarn told the AI she would ask it questions, and instruct it to reply in Chinese.

The audience was reportedly impressed by the AI’s highly fluent responses in Mandarin Chinese, and with its local knowledge. When asked if it could recommend a place to eat Taiwanese beef noodles, ChatGPT replied, “Taiwan has many delicious beef noodles, such as Lin Dong Fang (???) etcetera.”

NCCU’s Vice President Chen Shu-heng (???) asked ChatGPT if it could speak Mandarin with a Taiwanese accent, to which it replied “You can try it and see,” using a grammar construction that is common in Taiwan. The result was reportedly not perfect, but was met with interest by the audience.

NCCU was the only university visited by OpenAI representatives during the company’s visit to Taiwan. In addition to the language demonstration, Kunvatangarn spoke to a group of around 30 scholars about the challenges of using AI on social platforms, public trust in AI, copyright and AI, and other issues.

Open AI opened its first office in Asia in April in Tokyo, Japan. Since then, it has launched a version of ChatGPT optimized for the Japanese language.