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.

Choosing the right AI foundation

The Gallery knew that getting the kind of responses they wanted required a highly capable AI solution. “We compared responses from various AI models to determine which ones returned the best levels of accuracy for our needs, and the Azure OpenAI came out on top,” Ho shares. The decision to choose Azure OpenAI Service was also influenced by the Gallery’s existing reliance on Microsoft Azure, ensuring that the AI docent would integrate seamlessly into its broader digital ecosystem.

Together with NCS, National Gallery Singapore started building G(ai)le, an art-loving companion through the museum’s galleries. The team designed the experience to encourage visitors to form their own perspectives, reinforcing the museum’s role as a space for dialogue rather than instruction of what to think or feel. This approach required extensive work to fine-tune the AI’s responses, ensuring it provided insights without imposing a singular viewpoint.

“We spent a lot of time adjusting prompts, phrasings, and response structures to create a balance between informative content and open-ended discussion,” Ho explains. “The baseline quality of Microsoft’s AI technology allowed us to have the level of nuance and depth we wanted in G(ai)le’s responses. If the underlying technology weren’t strong enough, we wouldn’t even be having conversations about personality, relatability, or tone.”

Making art more personal

G(ai)le was designed primarily for visitors who are art-curious, but without existing art-historical expertise, and who typically feel a little shy about engaging with art at a museum. “For the everyday audiences who visit the museum on a date or a family trip, the combination of giant gallery spaces and austere framed paintings on walls might feel intimidating,” Ho explains. “They might find themselves looking at the artworks and thinking, ‘I just don’t get this.’ That is where we see G(ai)le really stepping into reach across the aisle and break down that barrier.”

G(ai)le engages such visitors in unexpected ways. “If someone said, ‘I really like Taylor Swift,’ it would bring up parallels between Swift’s evolution as a musician and the development of the piece of art or artist behind the work they’re looking at,” shares Ho. This approach allows visitors to see art through familiar cultural references, creating a more personal connection to the museum’s collection.

What makes G(ai)le even more exciting is its ability to remember visitors. If someone mentions they love K-pop, G(ai)le starts framing artworks through that perspective—highlighting relevant connections and comparisons. “The AI-driven platform personalizes interactions, making art more engaging and accessible,” adds Goh.

A lot of this approach was also the product of institutional self-reflection and awareness, like acknowledging that some local visitors today might even feel apathetic, or distant from art. With G(ai)le, the Gallery was able to include prompts like, ‘Meh. Why should I care about this?’ to address that head-on and to connect art to contemporary culture.

“For us, using a solution like Azure OpenAI is about new ways to make art feel accessible, rather than forcing visitors to talk or engage with it in our way. That’s something we’re able to do with G(ai)le,” adds Ho.

Expanding access through inclusive design

The AI docent is enhanced with multilingual support and inclusive design. “G(ai)le supports Singapore’s four main languages—Malay, Tamil, Mandarin, and English... and as a bonus even understands Singlish terms,” Ho explains. This multilingual capability addresses the Gallery’s aim to serve diverse local audiences, especially as in-person tours are not always available in the language a visitor may prefer. The Gallery also plans to expand the AI docent’s language offerings to better serve its international audience. “Our proprietary Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) achieved 95% accuracy in real-time speech-to-text transcription (STT) for Singlish," Goh shares.

Beyond language, accessibility features were built into the AI docent to accommodate different visitor needs. “We’ve put in the effort to ensure that G(ai)le meets all World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) accessibility standards,” Ho shares. The system includes a high-contrast mode and an open-source, dyslexia-friendly typeface that users can toggle on for easier reading. An audio-only format allows visitors to listen to responses instead of reading them, which opens possibilities for broader use among visually impaired visitors. The National Gallery Singapore also introduced an "eyes-up mode" to encourage visitors to spend more time looking at art rather than their screens. “Lots of small loving details like these are tucked away under the hood, making it quite a comprehensive product,” Ho adds.

Assisting staff with production and insights

The AI docent is more than a tool for visitors—it has also become an essential resource for the Gallery’s staff. “Internally, we’re thinking of G(ai)le like a new teammate—another docent that could work alongside our tours team,” highlights Ho. One of its biggest contributions has been in translation, not just across languages but also within English itself. “If we wanted to create different versions of a tour, a writer would have to manually rewrite the same content multiple times—for academic audiences, general visitors, kids, and sometimes from different cultural perspectives. Even the most talented writer can’t switch mental gears instantly; it takes time. But G(ai)le can do it in seconds,” Ho shares.

But the role AI plays is still clear, used to generate strong first drafts of content and allow staff to focus on refining and curating, rather than start from scratch. “We’re excited about this shift because it means we can spend less time on logistics and formatting, and more time crafting meaningful content and experiences,” Ho adds.

Beyond content production, the AI docent provides real-time insight into visitor engagement. “For the first time, we'll be able to see and analyze what people are actually asking about the artworks in our collection,” Ho states. “Insights into the conversations and questions visitors have could grow out of the digital space and inform the way we evolve our shows and reach our audiences.”

Redefining the role of museums

Moving forward, G(ai)le will only improve. "Designed for seamless integration with emerging innovations, including robotic assistants, the future-ready solution continuously refines interactions, delivering tailored insights that enhance visitor engagement,” Goh adds. “The future-ready platform ensures that the gallery can evolve with technology. This breakthrough enriches storytelling, enhances accessibility, and creates intelligent cultural experiences for all.”

G(ai)le is just the beginning of the Gallery’s vision for a more interactive and inclusive museum experience. The museum is also exploring integration with robotics and new ways for visitors to engage with G(ai)le beyond the physical space, through platforms like WhatsApp and smartwatches.

As the National Gallery Singapore marks its tenth anniversary, it is rethinking its role in a world where people create and consume culture online. “We’re seeing a shift toward museums becoming more collaborative and interactive spaces. The value of coming here isn’t just to look at paintings—it’s to engage in discussions, meet people, and participate in cultural experiences that can’t be replicated online,” shares Ho. “G(ai)le represents just one part of that shift. Instead of the museum being a one-sided institution that delivers knowledge, it’s becoming a space for dialogue and personal exploration. As exciting as it is, we see this as just the beginning—we’re only scratching the surface of what’s possible.”

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