ARTHUR GOLDSTUCK: No hotels staffed by robots until they learn to take a joke
At Tokyo's bot hotel, a virtual assistant mistook a guest's snoring for a question
A funny thing happened on the way to the future. The world's first hotel to be staffed almost entirely by robots, the Henn Na in Tokyo, recently fired half of its 243 robots. The reason? They often could not perform simple tasks like photocopying passports, and malfunctions meant they needed even more humans as backup. "They were trying to take the technology too far too quickly," says Julia Aymonier, chief information officer at Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne, the world's top-ranked hospitality management school. The institution, which has earned a Michelin star for its educational restaurant, this year introduced its first virtual-reality class, as well as a virtual personal assistant software "bot" using artificial intelligence (AI). Initially, it will help guests and students connect to the school's Wi-Fi, and later answer questions from potential students and parents about courses. Aymonier is adamant, however, that AI is for now only an aid to humans, and cannot replace them in h...
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