Passengers at Tokyo’s main international airport can meet a new employee, a robot called Kokoro.
Her job is to sell travel insurance but she is happy to help passengers with advice about the airport, including flight information and departure gates.
Passengers see a smiling young “woman” in a smart suit, who moves her head, bows, blinks, talks with a natural voice and can engage in conversation.
The words spoken by passengers are converted to text and sent to a cloud system for analysis. That system gathers all the information and uses it to develop better answers to passenger questions.
Kokoro will welcome, inform and guide passengers until May 8th 2017 in front of GPA overseas insurance counter in Narita Airport terminal 1, south wing, 4th floor, departure lobby.
The robot is the brainchild of Hello Kitty creator Sanrio and software company Kyoei Sangyo.
Acapela Group developed Kokoro’s synthetic voice.
Other robots at Japanese airports:
The number of robots trialed at airports (and ports) is increasing and includes:
- AnBot at Shenzhen Airport
- Airbot from LG, coming to Seoul
- ASIMO at Tokyo Narita
- Athena at Los Angeles
- EMIEW3 at Tokyo Haneda
- GLAdys at Glasgow
- Nao for Japan Airlines at Tokyo Haneda
- Leo at Geneva
- Norma, Amelia, and Piper at San Jose
- Pepper for EVA at Taipei
- ‘Sheldon’ at Indianapolis
- Spencer at Amsterdam Schiphol
- Unnamed at Seoul Incheon
- Zunpeng Xiaobao for Shenzhen Airlines
Kokoro is added to favourites!
She joins AnBot at Shenzhen Airport with the cattle prod and the Sheldon Cooper lookalike at Indianapolis in the top three.
N.B. Image credit: acapela-group
