Defining the Benchmark for Cantonese AI: Announcing the HKCanto-Eval Paper

THOMAS CHONG
6 JULY 2025
đź“– RESEARCH PAPER

As AI researchers in Hong Kong, we’ve long been aware of a blind spot in global AI: its limited grasp of Cantonese. But the problem is bigger than just one language. In the world of enterprise AI, LLM benchmarking is an absolutely critical discipline. It’s the essential quality assurance that moves AI from a fascinating technology to a reliable business tool. Without rigorous AI model evaluation, you are essentially investing in a black box.

How do you know if your AI-powered chatbot is providing accurate answers? How can you be sure your data analysis tool isn't misinterpreting local market sentiment? Deploying an AI without this data is a significant risk.  Tackling this challenge head-on is what drives our research lab. We wanted to provide a transparent, data-driven way to measure AI accuracy and performance. Our benchmark goes deeper than any other, testing everything from professional knowledge to cultural nuance, and even introducing novel tests for linguistic detail like Cantonese phonology - how the language actually sounds.

This rigorous approach to AI model testing is fundamental to our work at Votee.ai. Our expertise in benchmarking as a service allows us to provide clients with a clear, evidence-based understanding of which AI model - be it a major proprietary one or a fine-tuned open-source solution—is best suited for their specific needs. This ability to conduct deep enterprise AI evaluation is how we de-risk AI adoption for our partners, ensuring they invest in solutions that are not just powerful, but precise, reliable, and culturally intelligent for the Hong Kong market.

The expertise required to build a benchmark this sophisticated is precisely what we now offer to our enterprise partners. Our deep capability in benchmarking as a service allows us to provide clients with a clear, evidence-based understanding of which AI model - be it a major proprietary one or a fine-tuned open-source solution - is best suited for their specific needs. This ability to conduct deep enterprise AI evaluation is how we de-risk AI adoption for our partners, ensuring they invest in solutions that are not just powerful, but precise, reliable, and culturally intelligent for the Hong Kong market and beyond.