Intercontinental Hotels Group wants to reinvent the customer experience by putting artificial intelligence at the heart of its rooms.
IHG launches AI Smart Room
Developed in partnership with Chinese internet giant Baidu, the “AI Smart Room” aims to revolutionize interactions between the guest and the multiple technological devices in the room.
The customer will be able to choose to put his room in business or leisure mode, with different light and temperature settings, to control his speakers or his TV or to order room service simply by voice.
We can also imagine that the system remembers the preferences of a given customer to reactivate them in the future in the other rooms he will frequent.
Voice interfaces: it’s the future but it’s not ready yet
At Travelguys we are in favor of everything that makes the customer experience more fluid and personal, and this idea seems to us to be going in the right direction. Voice interfaces are definitely a part of the future of human/machine interfaces…but is the concept ready for a large scale launch ?
Even if the AI Smart Room will initially only concern 100 rooms and will only be available in China, we remain a little skeptical. Anyone who has “played” with Amazon Alexa and other voice assistants knows the limits of the exercise. So much so that according to the most recent figures, most of these devices end up quickly…in a drawer.
To live an experience is good, to suffer an experience is less so
Reliability of voice recognition, need to recognize multiple languages…everything is far from reliable today and in fact to improve the customer experience the risk of exasperating him is not far. To live an experience is good, to have the impression that one makes an experiment on us is much less…. But that’s probably why IHG is sticking to a 100-room perimeter. And as for a deployment outside China, there is a strong chance that the group will have to find another technological partner.
In short, we will follow with interest the deployment and the functioning of the product.
Photo : Smart room by Andrey Suslov via Shutterstock
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