[September 25, 2025] — ibokids, the world’s first licensed Mandarin AI storytelling platform, is officially live. The initiative is a joint effort between Ethan Tu, Founder of Taiwan AI Labs, and Chien-Fu Lee, Founder of Chinatunes Culture Incorporated, home to the largest Mandarin audio content copyright library. Following their earlier collaboration on the licensed AI music platform iBo-AI, this marks another milestone in the development of legally authorized AI voice applications.

Photo Caption: ibokids offers an interactive way for parents and children to choose their preferred “AI storyteller” and enjoy stories anytime, anywhere.

Authorized children’s publishers such as Yow Fu Culture, along with well-known voice actors including Rui-Chin Wang and “Uncle Pang,” have licensed their texts and voices for integration with AI speech generation technology. Since its launch, ibokids has already produced AI-narrated versions of more than 100 children’s audiobooks, which are now available across platforms such as Google, Kobo, Spotify, and international library networks—providing families with convenient, on-demand storytelling services anytime, anywhere.

ibokids takes an interactive approach that lets parents and children choose their preferred “AI storyteller.” Four AI voices—available 24/7—can narrate an entire book in as little as 30–40 seconds. This is 100 to 200 times faster than comparable services, which typically require one to two hours to generate an audiobook. The technology, powered by Taiwan AI Labs’ Yating Studio TTS service, delivers natural, human-like voices in both Mandarin and English without time or location constraints.

Unlike traditional bookshelf-style platforms, ibokids allows users to select both the story text and the narrator. Available options include AI versions of broadcasters Jia-Hao and Yating, trained with licensed data from Taiwan AI Labs, as well as AI voices modeled on Rui-Chin Wang and Uncle Pang, licensed and developed in collaboration with Chinatunes Culture Incorporated. Lee emphasized that this touch-based selection interface not only represents user autonomy in the AI era but also helps children develop motor coordination.

Photo Caption: From left to right: Uncle Pang, Chien-Fu Lee (Founder of Chinatunes Culture Incorporated), Ethan Tu (Founder of Taiwan AI Labs), and Chaohwei Huang (Chief Content Officer, Taiwan AI Labs).

Beloved by children as a “Storytelling King,” Uncle Pang personally attended the launch event in his signature costume, voicing support for the initiative. With humor, he remarked that the AI storyteller is his “friend, AI Uncle Pang.” While the voices of the real and virtual Uncle Pang may be indistinguishable, he assured that this only means he is “always available to serve children everywhere.”

As AI applications for human voices, singing, and music expand rapidly, creators face three key challenges: job displacement, lack of fair compensation for providing training data, and risks of voice misuse.

According to Tu, Taiwan AI Labs and  Chinatunes Culture Incorporated have pioneered industry-first licensing agreements with prominent singers and voice actors, ensuring legal use of voice data for training AI voice models, alongside clear revenue-sharing mechanisms. Tu stressed the company’s commitment to replacing “deepfake” technologies with “Deep Real”—a responsible AI framework based on deep learning and legitimate licensing. This approach ensures that creators who license their voices can benefit economically from their contributions, establishing a sustainable and positive AI economy.

Lee added that  Chinatunes Culture Incorporated  holds authorized texts from multiple Taiwanese children’s publishers as well as licensed storytelling voices, making it Taiwan’s largest audio content copyright repository. With ibokids as the starting point, the company aims to further introduce AI technology to transform Taiwan’s content creation and publishing industries. By shortening production timelines and reducing costs through licensed AI voices, the platform opens up greater access to high-quality storytelling for families across the Mandarin-speaking world.

For more information, visit: https://www.ibokids.com

[June 18, 2025, Taipei] — In response to the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and its transformative impact on education, Tzu Chi University and the Paramitas Education Association officially signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) today to integrate FedGPT AgentTeam, an intelligent learning platform developed by Taiwan AI Labs. This collaboration marks a significant step toward bridging educational innovation with humanistic values by introducing AI-powered tools into teaching, research, and campus operations.

The MOU was signed by Dr. Ingrid Y. Liu, President of Tzu Chi University, and Mr. Wen-Chin Huang, Chairman of the Paramitas Education Association, with Mr. Hong-Wen Chang, Chairman of Wizigo Co., Ltd., Ethan Tu, Founder of Taiwan AI Labs, and Chaohwei Huang, Chief Content Officer, witnessing the historic partnership. The collaboration focuses on four key areas: platform deployment and technical support; curriculum integration and pedagogical innovation; joint project development and results sharing; and ethical standards in data usage.

The Paramitas Education Association has long championed personalized education solutions using AI to support self-directed learning. By leveraging data from students’ learning histories, the organization has developed student-centered teaching frameworks grounded in evidence-based practices.

FedGPT AgentTeam is an agentic AI platform developed by Taiwan AI Labs, designed to support on-premise deployment, multimodal data processing, and highly automated workflows. While widely applicable across enterprise scenarios, the platform can be effectively adapted for educational use—offering capabilities such as intelligent knowledge retrieval, streamlined administrative processes, and enhanced teaching support.

The system connects with internal and external resources via the Model Collaboration Protocol (MCP) and Application-to-Application (A2A) integration, establishing a secure and trustworthy AI ecosystem. Core capabilities include:

• AgentTeam RAG: Facilitates cross-source, multimodal knowledge retrieval by integrating internal documents, curricula, regulations, and educational media to provide real-time, reliable academic support.
• AgentTeam Flow: Enables low-code process design, helping schools automate administrative and academic workflows—from academic records and cross-department collaboration to approvals—improving efficiency and reducing manual workload.
• AgentTeam Tuning: Allows customization of the AI model to understand domain-specific language and context, enhancing AI performance across teaching and administrative scenarios.
• Human-in-the-Loop Mechanism: Embeds a human review process throughout to ensure trustworthiness, accuracy, and compliance with data ethics in educational settings.

With support from both the Paramitas Education Association and Taiwan AI Labs, Tzu Chi University will implement FedGPT AgentTeam to enhance its Chinese-language capabilities in natural language understanding and academic assistance—empowering faculty and students to conduct more efficient and in-depth research and learning.

A key feature of the initiative is the rollout of a “24/7 AI Teaching Assistant”, designed to provide continuous learning support. The assistant offers immediate responses to student inquiries and delivers personalized guidance and extended resources based on individual learning levels—particularly beneficial for students needing additional support to bridge gaps and boost motivation.

“AI is not here to replace people, but to support them,” said Dr. Ingrid Y. Liu, President of Tzu Chi University. “Our AI assistant was designed to offer every student timely companionship and guidance, making learning accessible anytime, anywhere.”

Another major focus of the partnership is the “Tzu Chi and Social Development Research Project”, which includes the creation of three core knowledge bases: the Tzu Chi History and Culture Database, the Humanitarian Media Archives, and the Tzu Chi Global Events Knowledge Base. These resources will be powered by the FedGPT AgentTeam platform and aim to help faculty and students explore Tzu Chi’s contributions to humanitarian relief, cultural communication, and global engagement—fostering interdisciplinary and intergenerational research.

By leveraging AI, students will gain a deeper understanding of Tzu Chi’s mission while improving their abilities in research writing, data organization, and critical thinking—developing global perspectives alongside a profound sense of cultural empathy.

“AI must be embraced in the future of education, but never at the expense of its core values,” emphasized Mr. Wen-Chin Huang, Chairman of the Paramitas Education Association. “This partnership with Tzu Chi University is not just about sharing technology—it’s about co-creating values.”

Ethan Tu, Founder of Taiwan AI Labs, added: “The true value of an AI teaching assistant lies in its ability to understand the needs of the school and evolve with the learning environment. FedGPT AgentTeam is like a tireless digital assistant—always learning, always ready. It helps students with questions, supports teachers and administrators, and allows human resources to focus on meaningful, human-centered education.”

Looking ahead, Tzu Chi University will continue to integrate AI into its curriculum—guiding students from understanding AI, to applying it, and ultimately creating with it. Through practical applications such as the AI Teaching Assistant and research-oriented knowledge bases, the university remains committed to its founding values of compassion, joy, and selfless giving, while nurturing future professionals equipped with both empathy and forward-thinking innovation.

To further extend the impact of this initiative, the Paramitas Education Association will host a national education forum titled “Empowering Adaptive Learning with AI” on July 19, 2025, inviting educators across Taiwan to explore the future of collaborative, AI-enhanced learning.

[More Information]
Tzu Chi University: https://www.tcu.edu.tw/
Paramitas Education Association: https://twpea.org/
FedGPT AgentTeam Platform: https://fedgpt.cc

[Taipei, April 21, 2025] — Taiwan AI Labs and the Tzu Chi Culture and Communication Foundation today announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding to co-develop the nation’s first GPT-powered media solution, built on a domain-specific knowledge base and tailored for video and audio applications.

The service will aggregate over 100,000 videos and media assets collected by Da Ai Television since its founding in 1998. Leveraging AI technologies, it will automatically generate video summaries, scene logs, and continuously learn from data to assist production teams in creating scripts, manuscripts, and other innovative content formats—marking a major milestone in the digital transformation of Taiwan’s media asset management.

This collaboration is a pivotal step in realizing Tzu Chi’s vision of “Spreading the Dharma Through Technology.” For more than two decades, the Foundation has shared messages of truth, kindness, and beauty to over 136 countries and regions through satellite broadcasting, radio, websites, print publications, and social media. In the age of AI, this partnership focuses on revitalizing nearly 60 years of Tzu Chi’s archival content, extracting new thematic insights through AI while allowing media professionals to focus on producing emotionally resonant content—an embodiment of collaborative goodness between humanity and technology.

Duan-Jen Wang, CEO of the Tzu Chi Culture and Communication Foundation, emphasized that the mission is not merely to adopt generative AI, but to develop a large language model that deeply understands and conveys the spirit of Tzu Chi. “It may not yet feel weighty today,” he said, “but in the long run, this initiative bears witness to our times, documenting human history and preserving Tzu Chi’s legacy.”

Eric Yao, Director of Strategic Alignment and Development at the Foundation, noted that this collaboration is more significant than imagined. “We’re entering an era of Four Intelligences,” he said: Awakening Intelligence, without which there is no purification of the mind; Aesthetic Intelligence, which transforms beauty into impactful energy; Artificial Intelligence, which becomes more beneficial to humanity when guided by awakening and aesthetic sensibilities; and Altruistic Intelligence, the ultimate goal that Master Cheng Yen has long sought to realize. This partnership, he added, aims to integrate all four.

Ethan Tu, Founder of Taiwan AI Labs, shared that the teams are developing an AI agent with multimodal and multi-expert capabilities. It will recognize the who, what, when, where, and how of audiovisual content and support Da Ai’s scene-logging workflows, helping media professionals rapidly retrieve relevant information from vast archives.

In a field that prioritizes truth, AI must be professional and trustworthy. Tu pointed out that mainstream open-source models are akin to university interns with general knowledge but little domain-specific expertise. Training such models with sensitive internal data on external cloud services poses risks. In contrast, Taiwan AI Labs’ FedGPT was built under principles of trustworthy and responsible AI governance. Like a freshly minted PhD joining a company full-time, FedGPT can be retrained internally without sharing data externally, learning efficiently and securely through federated learning—loyal to the organization, without leaking sensitive information.

In today’s competitive AI landscape, FedGPT stands out as an internal expert model aligned with corporate sustainability and ESG values, consuming minimal energy while offering high efficiency and deep specialization. At Tzu Chi, FedGPT will act as a diligent new team member, boosting productivity in content production.

FedGPT supports Mandarin, Taiwanese, and English speech recognition, handling over 1.7 million hours of processing per year. It understands local linguistic nuances such as the Taiwanese idiom “Tiām-tiām tsia̍h sann uánn-kong puànn” (Still waters run deep). Unlike international models dependent on the cloud, FedGPT is equipped with Taiwan-specific anti-bias datasets and a Guardian mechanism to curb hallucinations and biases, offering more culturally attuned and accurate results.

Three Core Collaboration Areas for Smart Media Transformation

The collaboration focuses on three core AI services:

1. Scene-Logging GPT for Tzu Chi: Built on Taiwan AI Labs’ multimodal, multi-expert FedGPT platform, this tool will automatically interpret video content and build a structured media knowledge base with details like people, events, locations, and objects. 
2. Topic-Guided Assistant GPT: After selecting a theme, production teams can use FedGPT to curate related historical footage, streamlining the editorial workflow and enhancing real-time content delivery. 
3. AutoML Platform for Active Learning: Beyond pre-training on domain-specific data, FedGPT will leverage user feedback and internal video content to continuously refine Tzu Chi’s custom language model, improving analysis and productivity.
   

Ethan Tu emphasized that the year-long collaboration has helped Taiwan AI Labs deeply understand the real-world challenges of media workflows. FedGPT integrates a large language model (LLM), vision-language model (VLM), automatic speech recognition (ASR), enterprise knowledge base (AutoKB), and task assistant (AutoCopilot). Its training spans trillions of Traditional Chinese and English tokens, over 5,000 hours of Taiwanese speech data, and tens of thousands of annotated faces and clothing images—enhancing its ability to recognize local visual and audio patterns.

Even within the same person, changes in angle, hairstyle, or attire can challenge recognition systems. FedGPT tackles this with precise object recognition. Users can define targets—Master Cheng Yen’s robe, Tzu Chi’s signature blue-and-white volunteer uniforms, or specific volunteers’ faces—and retrieve all relevant images or footage instantly. It achieved 94.81% top-1 facial recognition accuracy in Google Images benchmark tests, demonstrating robust performance in complex environments.

For instance, if a team urgently needs footage of Master Cheng Yen’s travels, FedGPT can swiftly locate all relevant clips—even when masks and identical clothing obscure identities—saving countless hours of manual review.

FedGPT offers three levels of scene-log granularity:

1. Shot-by-shot visual topic identification. 
2. Segment-based thematic analysis (e.g., opening, interview, product demo). 
3. Full-video summaries with thematic essence. 

This dramatically reduces the manual labor of drafting scene logs or ensuring content quality. For teams handling dozens of clips daily, simply uploading media to FedGPT yields structured metadata like: “The reporter is conducting a street interview,” or “Cut to Reporter A’s live segment.”

The team also enhanced FedGPT’s contextual understanding of visuals, speech, and subtitles. For example, in disaster footage, it can be discerned that collapsed structures and overturned vehicles indicate a post-earthquake recovery scene, not a single accident.

Tu concluded, “AI grows through learning, and we’ve learned so much from Tzu Chi. Now it’s time to teach GPT to learn proactively—to speak a language aligned with Tzu Chi’s values. In this irreversible transformation of the media industry, this step we’re taking together is not just Taiwan’s first—it’s a world first. Tzu Chi is our first and best teacher.”

Today, many production tasks still rely on manual labor—especially scene logging. With FedGPT, challenges like parsing footage, logging scenes, and labeling dialogue or visuals can now be automated. It can adapt output formats to suit various teams and projects, semantically segmenting and summarizing content to ease editorial burdens.

With its ability to comprehend and analyze massive archives, FedGPT enhances search and editing workflows. It also learns from user feedback, gradually replacing traditional manual training processes. In the future, Tzu Chi’s production teams will interact directly with their custom GPT—not only improving efficiency but also generating content in Tzu Chi’s unique tone, further spreading the organization’s spirit of “united in heart, regardless of religion.”

[March 14, 2025] The Hualien AI Music Lab held its Opening Showcase today, featuring prominent musicians such as legendary folk singer and Lab’s Operations Director Li Jianfu (Li Jian Fu), Music Director Ado’ Kaliting Pacidal, as well as Suming Rupi and Lim Giong. The event unveiled four AI-assisted compositions inspired by “Whales, Ocean, Flowers, and Birds”—iconic elements of Hualien’s natural landscape. These works merge Taiwan’s rich cultural diversity with AI technology, symbolizing AI’s integration into everyday life beyond its cold, mechanical image.

Dubbed the “Godfather of Folk Music”, Li Jianfu was an early adopter of AI in music, having played a key role in developing AI i-Broadcast, the world’s first officially licensed Mandarin AI singing platform. At today’s event, Li guided the AI in recreating youthful renditions of Fan Yiwen and Li Mingde’s voices and visuals. Together, they performed “Drifting Bird” (composed by Jin Tiezhang and written by Li Shuping), blending real and AI-generated vocals to create a dreamlike fusion of past and present.

Renowned composer and film scorer Lim Giong, known for fusing tradition with technology, crafted an exclusive soundtrack for the “Creative Otherworld” exhibition space at the Lab. Infused with electronic elements, the music evokes the flow and vastness of the ocean, enhancing the immersive audiovisual experience. Visitors’ AI-generated lyrics are projected onto the walls, floating alongside cosmic whales gliding through a starry universe.

Renowned Amis singer-songwriter Ado’ Kaliting Pacidal, dedicated to preserving Indigenous culture, presented her original song “A Poem from the Ocean to the Island”. The song illustrates the interdependent relationship between the island and the sea—the Pacific, like a mother’s apron, embraces Taiwan as waves kiss Hualien’s shores, inspiring the songs of ancestors. The piece incorporates the Amis call-and-response singing style, with Ado’ leading and her AI-generated voice responding, symbolizing AI’s role in empowering artists through collaboration.

Suming Rupi, an Amis singer from Dulan, Taitung, drew inspiration from Hualien’s “Flowers” to compose “If I Were a Flower”, a heartfelt song performed alongside an AI-generated vocal track. The accompanying AI-generated music video incorporates Hualien’s signature natural elements—flowers, stones, the ocean, mountains, pine trees, and rice fields—bringing the island’s emotional and cultural essence to life in a unique visual and auditory experience.

The Hualien AI Music Lab, powered by Taiwan AI Labs, integrates Taiwan’s native AI creation tools. At its core is AI Music FedGPT, a GPT model specifically trained for Traditional Chinese pop music, with an extensive dataset of 100 billion Taiwanese linguistic records. Historically, AI-generated vocals have predominantly used Mandarin models, but through collaborations with Indigenous artists Ado’ Kaliting Pacidal and Suming Rupi, the Lab has successfully developed authentic AI-generated Indigenous vocals. Ado’ expressed amazement at AI’s capability, saying, “At first listen, I thought—this AI voice sounds exactly like me!”

Recognizing Hualien and Taitung’s rich music scene, the Ministry of Culture chose Hualien Cultural and Creative Industries Park as the site for the Hualien AI Music Lab. Since its soft opening in January, the Lab has welcomed nearly 10,000 visitors from Taiwan and abroad, generating over 6,000 AI-assisted songs.

The Lab’s first-floor AI Experience Exhibition is open to the public for free, offering a QR Code-guided tour through the Music Hallway, where visitors can create AI-powered songs in the Creative Otherworld, experience their AI-generated music videos played at the “Pick & Play Warehouse”, and capture their “Superstar Moment” at the Starlight Avenue photo zone.

For more information on upcoming lectures, courses, and performances, visit the official Hualien AI Music Lab website: https://hmusic.moc.gov.tw.