New Brunswick’s tourism department officially unveiled a new artificial intelligence chatbot to help tourists plan their trip here.
It’s not without growing pains, as several obvious errors appeared in the bot’s answers in its early days of operation. The company that created it said this is to be expected at the start and is easily fixable.
It’s really about meeting visitors where they are and where they want to find their information, said San Francisco-based Matatdor Network.
But the errors made by Explora, the chatbot, are nearly identical to those from the previous Progressive Conservative government.
On Friday, Public Safety Minister Robert Gauvin rose in the legislature and criticized Tammy Scott-Wallace, the former tourism minister from the Blaine Higgs government.
Two years ago, Scott-Wallace’s department worked with companies that ran tourism ads in Europe that featured simple factual errors about the province.
“She said that Saint John was the biggest city in New Brunswick, that it was the capital of New Brunswick. She talked about the Cherry Brook Zoo. The problem with the zoo? It’s been closed for five years!” Gauvin said in French.
However, the Liberal government Gauvin is part of had just officially launched its own tourism advertisement of sorts, featuring the same exact mistake, plus many more.
Experimenting in its first few days of operation, the chatbot made several mistakes including a claim that Saint John is the province’s largest city. That title actually belongs to Moncton.
While hawking Irving Nature Park, it showed a photo of the pond hockey tournament in Plaster Rock, a three-hour drive away.
Asked what provincial parks offer lake access, the first on the list is North Lake Provincial Park. The Liberal government announced last week this would be closed due to budget cuts.
“A hidden treasure near the Maine border, this park is a [paddler’s] dream,” Explora said.
The bot is not immune from the age-old adage that New Brunswick is the drive-through province, either. Asked for the fastest way to get to Prince Edward Island, Explora gives directions and then suggests visiting both provinces but leaving New Brunswick to find some seafood.
“[…] you can cross to PEI in the morning, enjoy a lobster roll by lunch, and be back in time for a sunset stroll along the Fundy coast,” Explora quipped.
Asked for winter road trip ideas, Explora urged travellers to head to both the Fundy Trail Parkway and Hopewell Rocks provincial parks, despite both being closed every winter.
Ask if you can visit a provincial welcome centre at either the Woodstock or Aulac borders, and Explora replies in the affirmative. Both closed years ago, the Aulac centre was torn down last year.
Ask if the province offers printed tourist booklets and Explora again said yes. They were discontinued in 2019.
The model appears a bit shaky on timelines. When you ask when New Brunswick Day is, it tells you last year’s date and then asks if you want to hear about things to do in Doaktown, where the festivities were held a year ago. If you say yes, up pops a photo and information about Doak House.
This historic site, just like North Lake, was shuttered in budget cuts this week.
“Should I visit the MacDonald Farm in Miramichi?”
“Absolutely,” Explora said, despite the provincial heritage site not opening since 2024, again because of Liberal funding choices. The chatbot will also suggest visiting the William Mitton Covered Bridge in Riverview if you ask about it, despite the bridge being demolished last year.
This AI chatbot wants you to travel the province — but user beware
Fundy National Park and Parlee Beach, two of the most popular attractions, are listed when you ask for the least-visited destinations.
Some of the data used by Explora seems to be simply old. “Who is the premier of New Brunswick,” you ask?
“As of now, the Premier of New Brunswick is Blaine Higgs,” Explora replied.
Days after CBC News first documented the errors, as least one of them appeared to have been fixed.
Explora is found in the corner of the provincial tourism website, ExploreNB.
Tourism Minister Isabelle Thériault said the contract for the model costs $28,000 annually.
The agreement was signed in 2023 before the Liberal government was elected, so she could not speak to why an American company was chosen over New Brunswick ones. A spokesperson later clarified that “there isn’t a Canadian company” offering what Matador Network’s AI model can.
“We want to go where the visitors are, we want to reach them,” Thériault said, explaining why the department is using Explora.
“So it’s really a chat to plan your trip. But the goal is to bring you here and meet the amazing people of New Brunswick.”
Asked about a few of the errors, she said the decision to close North Lake Provincial Park is not official until the budget process is complete in April, so information online wouldn’t be updated yet. As for other mistakes, she said the department would fix them.
“We absolutely need to correct that. So we will make sure to see that this information is adequate and correct,” Thériault said.
She added that checks and updates from the department for wrong information are an ongoing process.
Greg Oates is with Matador Network, a travel publishing company that created the AI model used for Explora, GuideGeek AI, three years ago.
He said many other places, such as New York City, Greece and Jasper, have their own GuideGeek AI models for tourism as well.
“New Brunswick is really at the forefront of this because it’s only a matter of time where I think this will just be expected for any organization,” Oates said.
He said an AI program like Explora is not meant to replace face-to-face interaction, which he described as the reason people travel in the first place.
“We just look at something like GuideGeek as a quicker and better way to get information,” he said.
Oates said there is an eight-week training period for each new AI system for it to understand the content on the website and then his team can tweak it if there are issues.
While AI models like Explora are trained to try and find information on the host website first — in this case ExploreNB — it will move to ChatGPT if it can’t find certain information.
He described the tool as helpful not only to tourists but also tourism departments who employ it because it shows them with very clear data what exactly users are interested in.
Oates said AI is not always perfect, and some errors can be expected.
“But it’s 1,000 per cent better than the old searching and drop-down menus and looking for something,” he said.
“We don’t get ahead of ourselves. The first thing is just to build it and test it. And there’s been a lot of testing in New Brunswick, right? Just everyone wants to make sure they can trust this.”
Oates said his team encouraged ExploreNB to “try and break it” during testing to make Explora say something they wouldn’t want it to.
“That, we passed that with flying colours,” Oates said.
“We want, more than anyone, locals to try, because they’re the toughest crowd.”
