City of Helsinki pilots watsonx.ai for multilingual customer care chatbot translation
City of Helsinki· FinlandIBM watsonx.ai
The City of Helsinki collaborated with IBM Client Engineering and IBM Consulting on a Proof of Value testing whether IBM watsonx.ai could translate foreign-language questions into Finnish for its customer care chatbot, which supports Finnish, English, and Swedish. Watsonx.ai scored 0.90 on the COMET machine-translation metric for English-to-Finnish translation (versus 0.91 for the incumbent system) and 0.87 for Swedish-to-Finnish (versus 0.86), performing on par with the city's existing translation solution.
Overview
The City of Helsinki collaborated with IBM Client Engineering and IBM Consulting on a Proof of Value testing whether IBM watsonx.ai could translate foreign-language questions into Finnish for its customer care chatbot, which supports Finnish, English, and Swedish. Watsonx.ai scored 0.90 on the COMET machine-translation metric for English-to-Finnish translation (versus 0.91 for the incumbent system) and 0.87 for Swedish-to-Finnish (versus 0.86), performing on par with the city's existing translation solution.
This entry has 13 published fields tied to exact passages in an immutable source capture.
Inspect the highlighted sourceThe challenge
The City of Helsinki's customer care chatbot supports three languages (Finnish, English and Swedish) and needs to translate questions in a foreign language into Finnish, the chatbot's base language, to increase intent recognition, with a high bar set for translation quality.
The solution
IBM Client Engineering and IBM Consulting ran a Proof of Value with the City of Helsinki, facilitating a series of Innovate Workshops to design the approach and piloting watsonx.ai as a Large Language Model for translating foreign-language questions into Finnish, measuring quality with the solution's intent recognition metric and the open-source COMET machine-translation evaluation framework.
Reported business value
Watsonx.ai performed on par with the City of Helsinki's currently used translation system: for English to Finnish it scored 0.90 versus 0.91 for the current solution, and for Swedish to Finnish it scored 0.87 versus 0.86, out of 1.0 on COMET. The team concluded watsonx.ai could be the new translation solution for the City of Helsinki, though more planning and testing is needed before it is deployed.
Sources
Open any source and check the claim yourself — that is the point of the register.
This record was researched and written with AI assistance, and its claims were checked against the sources above. (EU AI Act art. 50 transparency notice.)
Other government & public sector entries in the register.
GovTech unlocks data insights to improve nationwide services with Databricks
Singapore's Government Technology Agency (GovTech) migrated from an on-premises dashboarding system to the Databricks Data + AI Platform on AWS with Unity Catalog and Delta Lake, cutting dashboard creation time from 90 to 30 days, democratizing data across 50% of corporate divisions in the first year, and saving 8,000 labor hours annually.
GovTech· SingaporeDelta Lake · Lakeflow Connect · Lakeflow Jobs +1Estonia rolls out Bürokratt, an AI-guided virtual assistant network for public services
Bürokratt is a network of chatbots deployed on Estonian public sector institutions' websites, letting people obtain information from institutions and use public and information services via virtual assistants. It is a state-created, AI-based digital assistant that helps institutions deliver modern, efficient, around-the-clock customer service using large language models.
VA Advances Healthcare Insights With AI
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs leverages Databricks Data Intelligence to modernize healthcare analytics for millions of veterans, unifying massive distributed datasets into a single secure environment and streaming petabytes of health data in real time, reducing processes that once took hours to seconds. Databricks enables AI and large language models to detect risk early and enhance governance.
U.S. Department of Veterans AffairsDatabricks
Austrian Academy of Sciences unlocks Ancient Greek with Mistral
The Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW), together with its Austrian Archaeological Institute, partnered with Mistral and services partner Reply to build Apollo, described as the first advanced large language model for Ancient Greek. Apollo is trained on a specialized corpus of 600 million words of historical Greek text plus tens of thousands of published inscriptions and papyri, helping researchers reconstruct damaged texts and identify thematic connections across collections. The OeAW reports Apollo turns work that once took years into hours, addressing over one million unread Greek papyri worldwide, with future phases planned for semantic search and handwritten inscription decipherment.
Austrian Academy of Sciences· AustriaMistralWas this helpful?
Your feedback helps us improve our use case database