The Viettel AI Open Platform, an artificial intelligence (AI) platform, developed by the military-run telecoms group Viettel, was launched by the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) at a ceremony on 28 August.
The launch is part of a chain of events to introduce Made-in-Vietnam digital platforms to serve the national digital transformation program for 2025, with a vision to 2030 approved by Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc. According to the MIC Deputy, Nguyen Thanh Hung, the fourth industrial revolution is fundamentally changing production around the world on the back of breakthroughs in the internet and AI.
Many countries have recognised the inevitable development and significant transformational impact of AI in all aspects of life, which changes the balance of economic, military, and political power, he said, adding that AI is the heart of digital transformation.
The Viettel AI Open Platform provides platform technologies using AI to help automate, optimise and efficiently operate organisations and businesses via the world’s most advanced techniques. The platform is currently focusing on areas such as Vietnamese speech processing technology (Speech Processing), Vietnamese natural language processing technology (Natural Language Processing), and computer vision technology (Computer Vision).
The Director of the Viettel Cyberspace Centre, Nguyen Manh Quy, noted that to strengthen research cooperation to boost the national digital transformation program, Viettel is providing the platform free of charge to individuals, businesses and organisations that registered to use it during its application development phase.
In recent years, e-government platforms have developed rapidly. The number of provincial-level built-in and data sharing platforms has increased dramatically. In the past six months, the proportion of ministries and provinces that have this kind of platform increased by over three times; in February 2020, only 25 ministries, provinces had platforms, equivalent to 27%. The figure was 76 ministries July, or 82.6%. Currently, the rate of level-4 online public services is about 15.9%, doubling that of the same period last year. E-document exchanges between state agencies have reached a rate of about 88.5%, very close to the target of 90% by 2020.
Vietnamese enterprises have gradually mastered core technologies and developed technology platforms for digital transformation. MIC created an initiative to weekly launch Vietnamese platforms to honor and promote Vietnamese ICT products. So far, dozens of platforms have been launched.
The Prime Minister has PM requested ministries and localities to address shortcomings in the legal environment for building the e-government. He noted that the rate of online public services remains low, which is unlikely to reach 30% at the year’s end without new ways of implementation. Some ministries and provinces could only reach less than 10%, an alarming level.
The deployment of a national database that creates a foundation for the e-government has been slow, especially on land issues. The Minister urged MIC to map out a training project and a national digitalisation roadmap for localities, as well as complete a draft on the development strategy of the digital government for 2021-2025, with a vision to 2030, in the third quarter of this year.
