PARIS.- Coinciding with the end-of-year festivities, the Centre Pompidou is providing the public with its first “chatbot“, a French and English-language conversational agent designed with artificial intelligence to explore the collection of the Musée national d’art moderne.

Developed with the French start-up Ask Mona, this free innovative tool forms part of the Centre Pompidou’s digital strategy, which aims to create new channels for mediation and communication to enable the greatest possible number of people to access the resources of the Centre Pompidou.

Designed for a younger demographic, accustomed to using smartphones and who do not always wish to be accompanied by a guide during their visits, the chatbot provides content created by Centre Pompidou experts.

The chatbot is entertaining and easy to use, enabling the public to discover more than one hundred works in the modern and contemporary art collection. All the users have to do is take a photo of a work, which is automatically recognised by artificial intelligence. They then have access to exclusive content (historical context, anecdotes, etc.) and can engage in conversation with the chatbot.

Available in French and English, the chatbot has been developed around two main functions:

• Responding to visitors’ requests for classic practical information: fares, opening times, programmes, options for children, how to find lost items, and much more.

• Accompanying the public during their visit with customised mediation, covering one hundred and thirteen works in the museum, with messages, podcasts and videos.

This is the first time that an institution has used these technologies on such a large number of works in its collection, and that number is due to increase in the coming months.

Designed to train and enrich itself through conversations with the public, the chatbot will develop progressively in order to permanently improve its comprehension of questions. It will soon also be available in Spanish.

Ask Mona

Marion Carré and Valentin Schmite founded Ask Mona in 2017. The team develops conversational tools to provide information and mediation services for the public, along with solutions for analysing data in order to simplify how cultural institutions relate to visitors. Comprising a staff of fifteen, Ask Mona currently has more than seventy clients throughout France, with a variety of profiles: the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris Musées, the Grand Palais, the Théâtre du Châtelet, the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse, the Centre Pompidou-Metz, and many more. The solution is accessible directly online from visitors’ mobile phones or tablets, with no need for downloads.

Ask Mona aims to become the European leader for artificial intelligence solutions dedicated to the culture market in order to promote closer relations between cultural institutions and their public.

Ask Mona completed a second fundraising operation in 2021 with Bpifrance and Saga Invest, an investment fund specialising in art and new technologies, enabling them to continue to grow and invest in R&D in order to test and create new artificial intelligence solutions through innovative collaborative partnerships with cultural institutions.