National Gallery Singapore’s new virtual guide lets visitors engage with art in new ways, powered by Azure OpenAI
The National Gallery Singapore is a visual arts institution overseeing the largest public collection of modern art in Singapore and Southeast Asia. Its vast collection sits inside a beautifully restored 64,000 square-meter venue that was formerly Singapore’s City Hall and Supreme Court. As a public museum, the National Gallery Singapore aims to help as many people connect, resonate, and fall in love with art.
Making art more accessible through tech
Technology plays an important role in this work. “It takes effort to make art accessible, engaging, and relevant. That’s where technology comes in,” shares Ryan Ho, Head of Innovation and Experience Design at the National Gallery Singapore. “Our innovation initiatives focus on helping visitors experience and connect with art in more intuitive and personal ways."
To accomplish this, the Gallery works with various innovation specialists and partners—such as NCS.Partnerships like these have made it possible to tailor experiences to Singaporean visitors, incorporating local cultural references while maintaining the experience accessible to international audiences. The partnership with NCS has led to several pilot projects, mostly around ways to enhance visitor engagement with art. “It’s one thing to brainstorm ideas about how technology could enhance visitor engagement, but we value collaborative partnerships like these because they let us build, test, and refine these ideas. NCS have been great at that,” Ho adds.
NCS shares the gallery’s vision. “At NCS, we harness technology to revolutionize how people connect with art and culture. As the innovation partner of National Gallery Singapore, we are enhancing the museum experience with cutting-edge solutions like GenAI and our proprietary Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) to personalize visitor experiences, making art more accessible and immersive,” said Wynthia Goh, Senior Partner, Global NEXT, NCS.
The Gallery’s technology initiatives aim to bring the wealth of Southeast Asian art and social history to life for its visitors. “When someone walks into the museum today, they often feel lost or intimidated,” explains Ho. Wall texts provide limited context, and guided tours—while insightful—are constrained by schedules, language, and capacity.
The National Gallery Singapore decided to build an AI-powered docent to bridge that gap. G(ai)le searches the Gallery archives and delivers information about its artworks in conversational, accessible language and humor. “One of our longstanding challenges has been translating dense, academic research into content that is digestible for the average visitor. We quickly realized that AI could do more than just retrieve information; it could act as a bridge between academic language and visitor-friendly storytelling,” Ho shares.
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