AI. Evaristo, the 1st chatbot for the Portuguese language

Evaristo is his name and he is the first chatbot for the Portuguese language based on open artificial intelligence (AI), which gives a chocolate mousse recipe but fails to answer factual questions.

Inspired by the Portuguese film character played by António Silva in “O Pátio das Cantigas”, “Evaristo.ai” was designed by NLX — Natural Language and Speech Group of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (FCUL) and the subsidiary company OUSAR.AI and aggregates six open-access generative AI language models, including the Portuguese Gervásio PT, developed by the same team.

In a conversation, the user can choose between Gervásio, but also the models LLama (USA), Qwen and DeepSeek (China), Mistral Small (France) and Sabiá (Brazil). Through Evaristo.ai, one can obtain, for example, a cooking recipe, an itinerary for a visit to Portugal or the lyrics to a fado song.

However, when asked, for example, who Donald Trump is or when the last elections were held in Portugal, the answer given is that Trump was President of the United States and that the last elections in Portugal were in 2022 or 2024, depending on the AI ​​models used. The platform warns, for each model, that “ the result generated may not be correct, accurate, perfect and/or adequate ”.

Speaking to Lusa, the coordinator of the Evaristo.ai team and professor at the FCUL Department of Computer Science, António Branco, said that language models are trained with data and that this training had a time limit, which in some models was 2022, 2023 or 2024.

Justifying the advantages of this chatbot, which, by definition, is a program designed to simulate a conversation with humans, interacting and answering questions, generally through the use of artificial intelligence, and being used mainly in an online environment, FCUL states, in a statement released this Tuesday, that Evaristo.ai uses AI models that “are largely open, in terms of code, license and distribution” and “does not track its users or pass their content to third parties, safeguarding the privacy of users and the ownership of their content”.

“It is not based on the intermediation, resale or adaptation of third-party chatbots or generative AI services from third-party companies or organizations, nor does it commercially exploit user data”, assures FCUL, noting that Evaristo.ai “is the first chatbot for the Portuguese language based on open AI” and “multi-model”.