Grab Wants Users to Help Fine-Tune Its App's AI Feature

More voice samples needed to train app to understand accents better for ride-booking

- Sarah Koh

Getting a ride to his destination became easier for Mr Peter Lim in June, after Grab rolled out a voice assistant powered by artificial intelligence (AI) on its app.

Mr Lim, who is visually impaired, welcomed this development, since it meant he could book a ride simply by using his voice.

However, the 59-year-old call centre operator said that booking a ride to some places, such as Kalidasa Avenue and Lim Ah Pin Road, still poses a challenge.

The voice assistant has trouble at times understanding Singaporean speech patterns, so Mr Lim sometimes gives just the postal code of his destination.

Recognising this, Grab launched an open call in late June for voice samples from its users to fine-tune its AI model.

Built on OpenAI's GPT-4.1 large language model and fine-tuned with 80,000 voice samples provided by Grab employees, the model's accuracy in understanding Singaporean accents and names of places is already 89 per cent.

But further work needs to be done to account for the numerous ways in which locations across Singapore can be pronounced.

For instance, Hougang can be articulated with or without the letter "h", while Clementi can be pronounced as "Kle-man-tee" or "Klair-men-tee".