Robot concierge a novelty on the way to better AI
Robby Pepper greets guests in Italian, English, German
— Robby Pepper can answer questions in Italian, English and German. Billed as Italy’s first robot concierge, the humanoid will be deployed all season at a hotel on the popular lake Garda to help relieve the desk staff of simple, repetitive questions.
During one of Robby Pepper’s first shifts, Mihail Slanina, a guest from Moldova, congratulated the robot on his skills. “He’s like a real person, he’s really good,” she enthused. “He talks, he shook my hand.”
Developed by Japan’s Softbank Robotics, Robby has been taught a list of questions such as the locations of the spa, restaurants and opening hours, programmed by the Italian digital services company Jampaa. The summer tourist season will provide Robby with a crash course in unanticipated questions, not to mention accents, which will help improve his knowledge, vocabulary and ability to answer.
The use of such robots is growing in services sectors like tourism, where the scale of business can overwhelm staff with menial tasks. Most of the automatons serve mainly as novelties — humanoid versions of an Alexa or Siri meant to marvel customers. They represent an expansion in automation, but one that’s likely to be scaled up only when better artificial intelligence is developed.
The International Federation of Robotics, based in Frankfurt, Germany, forecasts sales of professional service robots will grow between 20 percent and 25 percent a year through 2020, from about 79,000 last year. That includes such diverse categories as defense robots, cleaning robots, medical robots and logistics systems robots. In 2016, 7,200 public relations robots like Softbank’s Pepper, used for mobile guidance and information, were sold — a full 135 percent increase over the previous year.
“Beyond the techy novelty to engage customers, the current use of robots for customer services is completely impractical, very simply because artificial intelligence digital agents are way too stupid to be practical beyond what the time is and what the weather is,” said Richard Windsor, a technology analyst based in London.