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📅 Today's Story: From Buenos Aires to Tokyo, cities using AI to improve public services, cut costs, and enhance citizen engagement. Emerging tools from WhatsApp chatbots to drone-mounted tree inspections are reshaping the urban landscape.
TECHNOLOGY
AI is Enabling Smarter, Safer Cities Worldwide |
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📰 What Happened: Cities around the world have already implemented AI tools to enhance services and operations. In Buenos Aires, for example, the Boti chatbot helps report crimes and violations via WhatsApp. In Tempe and Lisbon, AI vision detects and geo-maps graffiti, as Tokyo’s Plant Doctor inspects trees with drones. NYC is also crowdsourcing dashcam footage to improve street safety.
🔍 A Closer Look: Boti processes natural language and image inputs to communicate with citizens, saving time and streamlining city services. Meanwhile, graffiti and tree monitoring systems scan and analyze environments using AI, without human reporting. These tools rely on deep learning models, like YOLOv8 and DeepLabV3+, for high-precision visual analysis.
🧠 Why It Matters: Smart city tech is moving beyond buzzwords into practical, everyday use. By automating detection, inspection, and comms, AI lets cities run more efficiently and affordably, leading to cleaner streets, healthier green spaces, and faster services — a global trend toward more livable and resilient metros.
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