NDIA denies Cate Blanchett-voiced 'Nadia' virtual assistant is in doubt

The National Disability Insurance Agency has insisted it is still developing an innovative virtual assistant program, voiced by Cate Blanchett, despite reports it had been deterred by the “robo-debt” and census crises.

The program, dubbed “Nadia”, aims to utilise artificial intelligence to help the NDIA communicate with the hundreds of thousands of national disability insurance scheme participants.

To some fanfare in February, it was announced that Blanchett had volunteered her voice for the Nadia avatar, which was able to learn from its interactions and give spoken or written answers in 32 languages to thousands of NDIS queries.

A family experience of disability compelled Blanchett to donate her time to help the NDIS, and she was said to have the “perfect pitch” for those with hearing difficulties.

But in Senate estimates in May, it was revealed the government had no go-live date for Nadia.

Government officials were stressing the technology was “emerging” and it should “be caveated that it is very early in what it is”. The chief information officer at the Department of Human Services, Gary Sterrenberg, denied claims the project had stalled.

“I am not sure it has stalled per se. We did a lot of work in the early phases in co-design to understand the basic [question and answer] pairs. There are 3,500 questions related to that and we did a lot of work using participants themselves, because this is about a technology that is driven by those living with disability, rather than the department in any way,” Sterrenberg said.

“There are about 12 technologies linked together in this. As soon as that is ready we will be ready to take it to the next level.”

On Thursday, the ABC reported new concerns that the $3.5m Nadia project had stalled, due to nervousness created by successive government IT failures. The report cited the the census debacle and problems with Centrelink’s robo-debt system, which has issued at least 20,000 inaccurate welfare debts since mid-last year.

The NDIA has maintained the Nadia technology is still being developed, although gave no timeframe for its completion.

“The NDIA has been working closely with people with disability to explore a range of platforms that deliver accessible information in relation to the NDIS,” a spokeswoman told Guardian Australia.

“One of these platforms is a virtual assistant called Nadia. The work in developing this technology is ongoing,” she said.

The program was developed by a New Zealand-based company, FaceMe, in collaboration with people living with a disability, the human services department, NDIA, IBM Watson, Soul Machines and the University of Sunshine Coast.

It was due to begin trials in mid-2017, and would still be learning for the first 12 months.

“The more Nadia interacts with people, the faster she learns, and the more questions she is asked, the better she gets at supporting people with disability,” FaceMe said on its website.

But one of the early problems with the technology was the lag time between a question being asked and Nadia delivering an answer.

That was caused by IBM’s Watson platform, which needed to wait until the question was finished before converting it to text and sending it to Nadia to process. The government said that created a latency of about 30 seconds.

“You can imagine what a poor performance that would be,” Sterrenberg said in May.

“At the time IBM was working on a streaming technology that allowed it to send the voice as you were talking. As we moved on there is a number of platforms the department is having a look at. IBM is just one of them. There are several. As the technology matures we will be making the appropriate decisions about it.”

The Nadia program is designed to make information available to NDIS participants in a more accessible and personalised way, while alleviating huge strain on the agency’s call centre.