It has been an indisputable fact that the human robot, Engelberg, invented the first industrial robot for 58 years, and the human society will enter the "artificial intelligence" era. In the field of tourism, what surprises and conveniences does artificial intelligence bring to people's journeys?

Author: Financial Times APP Shuting Ye

On July 26th, the birth of Engelberg, the father of robots, the famous robotic expert developed the world's first industrial-grade robot in 1959, making science fiction a reality.

Today, 58 years later, artificial intelligence is no longer the imagination in books and images, but it is really happening around. The operators of the tourism industry also perceive the trend of artificial intelligence early and cut into artificial intelligence from different angles. You can customize the travel robot of the itinerary, upload the landscape photo to make the poem "small poetry machine", "brush face" can board the intelligent system... The application of artificial intelligence to tourism enterprises seems to be concentrated in 2017.

In addition to collecting big data, forming user images to achieve more accurate recommendations, in terms of robots, biometrics, etc., artificial intelligence will bring a new experience to all scenes in travel.

“In 2016 or before, people talked about artificial intelligence, which is the big three elements of big data, computing power, and algorithms. But in 2017, everyone talked about four elements and started to talk about the scene.” Yan Shuicheng, dean of the 360 Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, said.

Planned scene

In the past, during the planned itinerary, people may go to the travel agency to consult in person. If you have a wealth of experience in planning travel, you will enjoy free travel by booking airline tickets and tickets online. But artificial intelligence will break this situation. Through deep algorithms, tourism companies will be able to fully understand the user's travel goals and preferences, and give customized advice.

Tourism Raiders Community Ant Cell announced the establishment of the AI Division earlier this year. In addition to the high-profile participation of the former Google Ultimate Lab "Google X" chief AI expert Dai Yongming, it also plans to launch the world's first ultra-smart travel robot "Pane No. 1" during the year. . Ant Cell hopes to use the big data accumulated over the years to analyze user characteristics and interest preferences and develop travel robots.

If the cellular robot is still in the research and development stage, then Utrip, a travel planning portal based in Seattle, USA, has taken artificial intelligence and machine learning to bring the intelligence of the travel plan to a new level.

As a standard booking website, Utrip combines millions of destinations, events and restaurants through artificial intelligence algorithms. Once the system knows the user's preferred destination, Utrip can use the user's travel preferences to give a daily itinerary. And timing suggestions.

In June of this year, Utrip cooperated with JetBlue's holiday brand for the first time. Users can create a personalized and meticulous vacation trip within a few minutes, including JetBlue's flights, hotels and other services.

Communication scene

Travel is often considered a vague and emotional buying process, which is why consulting before buying a product is more important than other consumer products. In order to achieve more efficient user communication, artificial intelligence is also applied.

Last year, Ctrip Call Center officially launched a new generation of robot systems, customer service robot processing business has accounted for nearly 40% of total ticket booking customer service. This system uses the automatic coding technology of deep neural network. Up to now, more than 50 personalized scenes have been landed, and the scene conversion rate has been increased to 13 times, which greatly improves the efficiency and recommended accuracy of users.

The full communication between the company and the customer is very important. The data shows that the travel brand deploying the chat robot can effectively improve the booking volume, auxiliary sales performance and customer service satisfaction.

As more and more vendors enter the chatbot industry, natural language processing becomes more mature, and the cost of deploying a relatively simple chat bot is not very high.

The French luxury hotel brand Edwardian Hotels came up with this in the digital revolution. “We are focusing on the customer's entire spending journey and how they interact with a company and existing digital products. We feel that there is still a long way to go with the needs of consumers. Our strategy is to let chat bots fill this. The gap, because we know that chat bots will do better in improving consumer satisfaction and related metrics," said Edwardian IT director.

Travel scene

The application of artificial intelligence in travel is no longer unusual, and biometric technology has become the direction of many airlines.

In June this year, China Southern Airlines launched the nation's first personal face recognition intelligent registration system at Henan Nanyang Airport. The system's technical partner Baidu said that the accuracy of this technology reached 99.7%, compared with 93% of the human eye recognition. The rate is even higher.

Delta Air Lines also partnered with Cleartech, the US biometric security company, to announce in July that its members can use the fingerprints to board planes at Washington National Airport without having to present a paper boarding pass.

The system relies on identity technology provided by Clear, which currently serves 13 airports across the United States. After registering online, users need to go to the airport or the information center near the large stadium to enter fingerprint and iris information.

JetBlue, Emirates, British Airways, KLM and other airlines have also tested the application of biometrics in the registration process, which will provide passengers with a smoother travel experience in the long run.

Journey scene

From planning to scheduling to travel, people even find that artificial intelligence can participate in the journey.

KLM will soon launch a smart voice tag. When passengers walk or ride in the city of Amsterdam, the luggage tag can provide the correct prompt at the right time and location. The luggage tag even has practical tips, including how to lock the bike, when to watch out for pickpockets, and where to taste local food for free.

In addition, there are many other destinations, programs or applications that provide convenience for visitors during the R&D launch. The timely interaction of location data will be the focus of the user experience.

In order to maintain the competitiveness of the industry, tourism companies are in the field of artificial intelligence.

The company established the AI Business Unit, which is the company's top secret research and development department. It is responsible for the research and product development of travel-related cutting-edge technology. The responsible team has rich R&D experience in frontier fields such as human-computer interaction, natural language processing, and computer vision.

Ctrip's big data department currently has more than 40 people. Last year's AI product "Little Poetry Machine" appeared to be "not working properly", but relying on the underlying foundation of "Small Poetry Machine", it will be able to develop more applications. The artificial intelligence products in the hotel and consumer sectors have technically enhanced Ctrip's competitiveness in the OTA field.

The same-course tourism of the same OTA, when establishing the tourism entrepreneurship incubation platform of Tongcheng, also regards the fields of big data, artificial intelligence, and Internet of Things as the focus of attention, and hopes to bring new technologies and models to enterprises through incubators. To enhance the vitality of the company.

Recently, the State Council recently issued the "New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan", which is China's first plan for system deployment in the field of artificial intelligence. As the core driving force of the new round of industrial transformation, artificial intelligence creates a new powerful engine and reconstructs all aspects of economic activities such as production, distribution, exchange and consumption. For tourism companies, this is a core technology that cannot be detoured. For tourists, artificial intelligence will go deeper into every detail of the travel process.

(This article was originally created by Time Commercial's commercial channel)