Australia’s ORCA Opti celebrates acquisition success with award for AI innovation
Australian specialist AI security and compliance provider ORCA Opti is celebrating one of its recent acquisitions’ win of the 2025 VALA Award with State Library of Queensland for an innovative AI experience that helps connect younger generations with Australia’s ANZAC history.
The awarded project, called Virtual Veterans, is an innovative AI-driven chatbot that has taken on the persona of a World War 1 soldier named Charlie. The chatbot provides an innovative and interactive interface through which users can learn more about the Great War that helped shape the national identities of Australia and New Zealand.
The VALA Award is a biennial recognition that highlights innovative use of ICT in libraries, galleries, museums,archives and information services across Australia to improve customer service. State Library of Queensland shared the 2025 VALA Award with Monash Health.
Originally developed by Queensland-based company TalkVia AI, which was recently acquired by ORCA Opti, the chatbot can respond to questions about the conflict in character as well as direct users to rich collections of resources from State Library of Queensland, digitised newspapers, and the Australian War Memorial.
The development, undertaken in three months included the creation of the fictional veteran, establishing guidelines around relevant topics of discussion and training a model on that criteria, enabling the model to retrieve relevant database information, and testing conducted by TalkVia AI, State Library staff and stakeholders like teachers and veterans.
- The indexed data set draws from 1.3 million words from State Library of Queensland’s digitised World War I collections, including letters and diaries of both men and women who served during World War I in a variety of roles
- More than 50,000 Queensland newspaper articles from 1914 to 1918 accessed through Trove
- And the full 12 volumes of the Australian War Memorials ‘Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918, by Charles Bean
Initial deployment misuse and rapid remediation with ORCA AI Guardian demonstrates strength of combined expertise
While Virtual Veterans was an exciting project for State Library Queensland, the launch initially faced some issues. State Library Queensland observed misuse and jail-breaking of the AI, wherein users would try to ‘trick’ the chatbot into responding outside of its fine-tuned training and programming.
The Library and TalkVia AI responded quickly with an audit and remediation works to reduce the potential for jailbreak and off-topic conversations. Central to the audit was a suite of advanced red‑team tools from ORCA Opti AI Guardian (formerly RedTie AI), designed explicitly to stress‑test conversational intelligence systems.
Menace, one of ORCA Opti AI Guardian’s flagship tools, was deployed to simulate over 10,000 adversarial attack scenarios targeting Charlie’s AI stack, ranging from prompt injections to persona manipulation and chaining exploits.
The audit further incorporated ORCA Opti Warden, a real‑time defense layer that guards against more than 30 distinct attack vectors, including data extraction and persona hijacking, without degrading the user experience. Finally, ORCA Opti Profiler provided ongoing monitoring and threat intelligence to detect anomalies and suspicious behavior within chatbot interactions.
The efforts have been successful. Virtual Veterans has had security uplift to ensure that hacks or jailbreaks are minimised. The project continues to be monitored and there have been no jailbreaks since the initial issue.
ORCA Opti Founder and Managing Director Kathryn Giudes (pictured) said the project innovation and successful security remediation demonstrated the range of capability that the company was building and bringing to its customers.
“We’re thrilled to have received this award and this case study marks such an important story in modern AI project integrations,” Giudes said. “Organisations are raring to go with AI projects but often are unaware of the security implications that goes along with it.
“The expertise we have built can provide companies with peace of mind across policies, tasks breaches and incident response. With ORCA Opti’s AI guardian we are connecting and operating core business operations with secure AI.”
