In a first for New Zealand, the Foundation for Arable Research has upgraded its website search function to bring growers into the world of artificial intelligence.
The upgrade sees the introduction of a new tool designed to help find and summarise information on the FAR website.
FAR communications manager Anna Heslop said the tool, Ask FAR, is unique to NZ.
It is being held up by Amazon Web Services and NZ-based AI platform Caitlyn as a cutting-edge application of generative AI technology.
“Our website contains thousands of research reports and extension documents relevant to growing and harvesting many different crops; as such, identifying the one document that will provide the information required to address a specific question can be tricky,” Heslop said.
Ask FAR solves that problem by doing all the searching, summarising the information available and providing referenced links to the full documents, on the FAR website.
“Ask FAR will only consider information from the FAR website so you can be certain that answers are based on independent NZ research.
“For example, if you Ask FAR, ‘When should I put N on ryegrass seed crops?’, it provides a summarised answer where key points are directly referenced to one of 18 documents on the website.
“Using the standard search function, you would just get the list of 18 documents and then have to go through them to find specific information.”
Ask FAR went live on August 5 and can be accessed at www.far.org.nz/ai or from the ribbon at the top of the website homepage.
Heslop urged farmers to “please have a go and use the feedback, thumbs-up or thumbs-down buttons to let us know if the answers were useful, accurate or otherwise”.
“It’s learning all the time, so the more people who use it, the better it will get.”
