Evaristo is the first chatbot designed specifically for the Portuguese language using open artificial intelligence — and no, he doesn’t spy on you. Created by the NLX research group at the University of Lisbon’s Faculty of Sciences and its spin-off OUSAR.AI, Evaristo blends six open-access generative language models, including Gervásio PT, the team’s homegrown Portuguese model.
Named after a beloved character from the classic film O Pátio das Cantigas, Evaristo.ai can whip up a chocolate mousse recipe, plan a fado-themed road trip, or suggest lyrics for your saudade soundtrack. It lets users toggle between models like LLama (USA), Qwen and DeepSeek (China), Mistral Small (France), Sabiá (Brazil), and Gervásio PT — making it the first Portuguese-language multi-model chatbot of its kind.
There’s a catch, though: factual precision isn’t its forte. Ask about Donald Trump or the date of the last Portuguese elections, and you might get fuzzy or outdated responses — a limitation of the training data, which varies by model (2022–2024 cutoffs). Still, Evaristo is not here to monetize your questions or mine your data. Unlike most commercial AIs, it keeps your queries private and doesn’t send anything to third parties.
As project lead António Branco explains, the real goal is a transparent, non-commercial, and sovereign AI tool for the Portuguese-speaking world.
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