A voice chatbot startup makes a splash in the hotel industry

Chatbots are taking over the hospitality industry, particularly when it comes to concierge services.

Sure, human concierges can handle everything from ordering airport transfers to giving restaurant recommendations. However, they can only do so much when you consider the hundreds of rooms that an average hotel has, and the different requests and questions that they get around the clock. As such, using chatbots is an ideal way to get some of the most menial tasks done.

Recently, Tech in Asia talked to Swami Sekar, founder and CEO of Singapore-based startup Winimy AI about his vision for HotelBot, a voice-enabled concept that’s designed to handle nearly everything on the customer engagement front.

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Launched in June 2016, Winimy’s AI concierge has been deployed everywhere, from events and conferences to shopping malls and similar venues. The hands-free product also works across multiple channels. All users have to do is to speak into a Winimy-powered device, explain their request, and the device will reply with instructions. The process is much like talking to a real-life concierge.

Developing these capabilities has been Winimy’s bread and butter in the last two years. The startup’s core products now include Voice AI, AI Concierge and AI Chatbot. It also offers holographic telepresence technology: it can “beam” your CEO or anyone into a conference to give a presentation, describes Sekar.

He adds, “We’ve integrated our conversational engine with readily available voice assistant speakers, such as Google Home, Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana.” Where needed, he says that Winimy also works with open-source natural language understanding (NLU) engines like Rasa to design customized on-premise AI and NLU modules that don’t require a public cloud infrastructure to work.

However, he has set his sights on an even loftier goal: a HotelBot that will take over even more tasks.

Essentially, Winimy eventually hopes to tackle customer engagement, from ordering room service and providing basic information (Wi-Fi passwords, check-in/check-out times, etc.) to troubleshooting technical problems (broken faucets, malfunctioning television, etc). These solutions can either be deployed within an existing app as a chatbot or via in-room smart speakers, which can double as a personal voice-enabled concierge.

The HotelBot can be used to automate routine tasks at call centers as well, providing consistent, reliable, and personalized customer service 24/7 with increased efficiency. And since Winimy’s intellectual property includes multi-language support, it can reduce communication barriers for international guests, which is helpful in the hotel setting.

See: Chatbots have finally arrived in Southeast Asia

These concepts don’t just look good on paper, either. Over the last 1.5 years, the startup has been working with a leading luxury smart hotel group in Singapore to integrate a Winimy-powered chat module into its existing app. Users can get basic hotel information and request services via the messaging function.

During this first phase of operations, the installation rate of the app increased by five times, shares Sekar. And of the guests that used the app, 100% of them used the messaging function.

Now that Winimy has 1.5 years’ worth of conversation data, it can calculate how much talk focused on room service and complaints versus compliments as well as check-in and check-out schedules. “That way, we know which ones we need to automate and which ones we can hand off to a human in the next phase,” notes Sekar.

Slow to adapt

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