Australian AI security and compliance specialist ORCA Opti is celebrating national recognition after one of its recent acquisitions helped secure the 2025 VALA Award alongside the State Library of Queensland for an innovative AI experience connecting younger generations with Australia’s ANZAC legacy.
The award-winning project, Virtual Veterans, features an AI-driven chatbot embodying a World War I soldier named Charlie.
Through natural conversation, the chatbot offers users a compelling and educational way to explore the stories, context, and impact of the Great War — a defining period in the shared histories of Australia and New Zealand.
The VALA Award, presented biennially, recognises outstanding and creative applications of ICT in libraries, galleries, museums, archives, and information services across Australia. This year, the State Library of Queensland shared the honour with Monash Health.
Virtual Veterans was originally developed by Queensland-based TalkVia AI, a company recently acquired by ORCA Opti.
The chatbot blends conversational AI with curated historical content, guiding users to collections from the State Library of Queensland, digitised newspapers, and the Australian War Memorial, while staying in character as the fictional soldier.
Developed in just three months, the project involved crafting the persona of Charlie, setting content and interaction guidelines, training the AI model to retrieve verified information, and extensive testing in collaboration with teachers, veterans, and library staff.
- 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
Recognition marks a milestone for ORCA Opti as it continues to expand its portfolio of AI innovation through strategic acquisitions and partnerships across Australia’s technology landscape.
While Virtual Veterans was an exciting project for State Library Queensland, the launch initially faced some issues. State Library Queensland observed misuse and jailbreaking 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 says 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,” said Giudes
“Organisatins 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.” she said.
