Japanese media company Nikkei has joined the stream of financial publications who have decided to build their own chatbot. However, unlike global publications, Nikkei had to build their own model to retrieve articles from their database as external large language models (LLMs) are not ready to process Japanese characters. Nikkei combines this work from its own model with summaries produced by an external LLM.
The company’s chatbot is called Ask! NIKKEI and its user experience is similar to ChatGPT’s or Google Gemini’s. Users can ask the chatbot whatever they want to know and Nikkei will respond to them — as long as it has the answers in its vast database. Nikkei uses articles from after 2020, and typically within the last 18 months. The chatbot, only available to subscribers, is integrated within the articles to help users clarify complex financial topics and it even suggests questions for users to ask.
Read the complete interview with Yosuke Suzuki, Engineering Manager at Nikkei, about this chatbot, content copyright, hallucinations, and language.