Case Study: Pointe-à-Callière Museum brings Joe Beef to life with Dpt.'s AI-powered historical character

Pointe-à-Callière Museum creates a real-time bilingual AI exhibit with Dpt. that sustains visitor attention beyond typical dwell times

For Pointe-à-Callière Museum, Dpt. created an AI-powered historical figure to bring a 19th-century tavern keeper to life. The challenge was to balance historical accuracy with open-ended, conversational freedom for visitors, all while developing a reliable, offline-first technical installation that would serve as meaningful cultural mediation rather than just a technological novelty.

Dpt. developed a fully integrated, on-site AI pipeline combining speech-to-text, a local large language model, and a retrieval-augmented generation system grounded in curated historical archives. This was paired with a realistic 3D character and seamless voice interaction. The installation successfully delivers natural, bilingual conversations that consistently sustain visitor attention beyond typical dwell times, establishing a new model for participatory cultural mediation.

Pointe-à-Callière Museum