{"id":690779,"date":"2026-05-24T14:58:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T14:58:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/690779\/"},"modified":"2026-05-24T14:58:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-24T14:58:11","slug":"tapping-into-manitoba-history-will-be-easier-with-futuristic-boost-from-ai-chatbot-creators-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/690779\/","title":{"rendered":"Tapping into Manitoba history will be easier with futuristic boost from AI chatbot, creators say"},"content":{"rendered":"

Manitoba’s history is being ushered into the future through artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg and the Manitoba Historical Society are teaming up to create their own locally developed AI chatbot that will enable the public to reach deep into the province’s past in a new and instant way.<\/p>\n

“It puts a historian within reach of anyone, like a genuine bona fide someone who knows the right answer. It gives everyone access,” said Gordon Goldsborough, acting executive director of the Manitoba Historical Society<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The MHS website has more than 30,000 individual pages of historical information, a digital archive that features everything from prominent figures to local organizations and businesses, events and sites.<\/p>\n

It’s a vast and valuable source of material, but searching those records can take some time \u2014 doing things like plugging in various keywords and going through links \u2014 before you land on the answer you want, said Tim Rogalsky, associate professor of mathematics at CMU.<\/p>\n

\"ACMU mathematics Prof. Tim Rogalsky says the chatbot will work on mobile or desktop platforms ‘and whatever new platforms may come to pass in this new world that we’re entering into.’ (Submitted by Tim Rogalsky)<\/p>\n

The chatbot will enable people to ask for information in plain, conversational language and get immediate results, he said.<\/p>\n

“And the answers will be verified and validated and cited with sources,” said Rogalsky, who is leading the development of the MHS agentic chatbot project.<\/p>\n

It will use geolocation, so if someone asks the chatbot what historical sites are around them, it will provide that specific information, he said.<\/p>\n

“Just ask a question: ‘Tell me more about this site,'” Rogalsky said. “Or as Gordon suggested, ‘I just drove past a small historical plaque and I don’t know what that is. What is that?'”<\/p>\n

If your device’s location services are on, the system will know where you are, look it up and let you know.<\/p>\n

It will work on mobile or desktop platforms “and whatever new platforms may come to pass in this new world that we’re entering into,” Rogalsky said.<\/p>\n

And when information can’t be found or the chatbot isn’t certain about the answer, it will be up front about it, unlike giant chatbot programs such as Grok, ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, which use incredibly massive datasets and provide “long tails of general information,” he said.<\/p>\n

\"AGordon Goldsborough, acting executive director of the Manitoba Historical Society, hopes the new technology helps reach younger audiences. (University of Manitoba)<\/p>\n

“They don’t yet say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t have a whole lot of information, so this might not be accurate,'” Rogalsky said.<\/p>\n

Instead, they’ll fill that gap with a lot of “crap,” Goldsborough said.<\/p>\n

“Often AI, if it doesn’t know an answer, will just make one up, and it’ll sound authoritative. Then people go, ‘Oh, well, it must be true; the computer told me.'”<\/p>\n

The aim for the CMU\/MHS chatbot, if it can’t find the information, will be to engage with the user to see if they have something to share. It will then connect them with someone from the MHS, who can take that information, check it, validate it and add it to the database.<\/p>\n

“So we’re connecting people to people, and we’re connecting people to places,” Rogalsky said.<\/p>\n

It could also help connect younger people to the past, which is always a challenge, said Goldsborough, an associate professor of biology at the University of Manitoba.<\/p>\n

“The reality is that a lot of times, younger people look at history as boring. This is a form that will potentially appeal to them, and if we can get their attention [this] way, then I’m all for it.”<\/p>\n

Rogalsky was awarded just under $150,000, spread across two years, to create the chatbot and put in a new server at CMU to run it.<\/p>\n

The money comes from Research Manitoba, which earlier this month announced more than $1.3 million<\/a> for seven AI projects led by researchers at post-secondary institutions.<\/p>\n

Much of the funding will go toward paying undergraduate students to research, help build and evaluate the system before it becomes available to the public, Rogalsky said.<\/p>\n

Year 1 will be developing it. Year 2 will be evaluating it.<\/p>\n

“Realistically, [by the] summer of 2028, we could start to see a prototype out there in the hands of more people than just our testers and evaluators,” said Rogalsky, who’s a computational mathematician and has been using computer models and algorithms for 30 years.<\/p>\n

In late 2022, he obtained a certificate in AI from the University of Toronto and learned how to build neural networks.<\/p>\n

“I’m excited. This is really fun,” he said.\u00a0“Understanding history, learning about the stories of our past can help us with the kind of perspective that we need today.”<\/p>\n

Rogalsky is designing the chatbot with reconciliation in mind.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“Archives are primarily written by settler-colonial historians. The first thing that we’re doing right now is to seek to develop relationships with First Nations and M\u00e9tis and Inuit people in the province through our own connections at CMU and through the MHS to say, how can we do this in a good way? Let’s make sure that we set this up right from the start.”<\/p>\n

Once the program is complete, the code will be made open source so other heritage organizations can make a simple adjustment and have their own database chatbots, Rogalsky said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Manitoba’s history is being ushered into the future through artificial intelligence. Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg and the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":690780,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":["post-690779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=690779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/690780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=690779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=690779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=690779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}