Amália: the first Portuguese LLM headed for gov.pt

What Amália is (and isn’t)

This week saw the release of Amália (Automatic Multimodal Language Assistant with Artificial Intelligence), billed as the first Portuguese LLM. Anyone expecting it to be a Portuguese-language ChatGPT built entirely from scratch was always going to be disappointed - not least because the budget would never stretch that far.

How Amália is meant to be used on gov.pt

For now, its immediate purpose is not to chat directly with citizens. Instead, the aim is for it to be embedded into applications - in particular the gov.pt portal - so that people can navigate and use public services more easily.

Current limitations and what to expect next

At this stage, it is an AI tool without a “chatbot” interface, and it does not answer questions. It feels oddly tailored to the image of Portuguese politicians: they love announcing initiatives, but then never seem available to be held to account.

Still, it is worth waiting to see how it develops. It is better than nothing. As the real Amália might put it: “Thank you! Thank you!”