A real-time chat between students and the SAR's first astronaut Lai Ka-ying, could happen as soon as September.

Technology minister Sun Dong told a TV programme that Lai, who has been aboard the nation’s space station for more than two months now, is expected to have an exchange with students in primary and secondary schools once the next academic year begins.

Sun also said that while aerospace technology is new to Hong Kong, the government supports universities to conduct research in the frontier sector to serve national development.

In his blog, Sun also mentioned that the government hotline 1823 for general enquiries currently handles 7.51 million calls annually, with an average of more than 20,000 cases per day.

He noted that AI technologies would be introduced into the service to reduce redundant work.

A speech-to-text function and large language model can also transcribe residents’ calls into text in real time to further shorten the processing time, Sun added.




Edited by Azam Khan