J-STORIES – A trial in which ChatGPT, a generative AI (artificial intelligence), acts as a “concierge” to answer various questions from hotel guests began in Japan on June 21st.
The AI concierge, available 24/7, provides instant, specific information about the hotel and its surroundings that isn’t listed on the website, such as room service menus and the location of windows in guest rooms. It’s a service that offers the same kind of attentive, human-like service and quick-witted communication as a skilled concierge.
This service, named ” Kotozna ConcierGPT,” was developed by Kotozna , a company that has provided multilingual chat tools and other services for businesses.
By incorporating OpenAI ‘s latest language model, ” GPT-4, ” into their multilingual communication tools , the company has made it possible to have specific and hospitable conversations even with high-context questions that require contextual interpretation.
“The hotel industry made significant layoffs due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but in the past year, the number of guests, including inbound tourists, has recovered considerably. However, there is a severe shortage of service staff, preventing hotels from operating at full capacity. In addition, there is a shortage of multilingual staff to serve inbound tourists, and multilingual chat GPT has emerged as a substitute. Labor costs can be kept significantly lower with chat GPT,” says Genri Goto, CEO of Kotozna.
As the COVID-19 pandemic spread globally, the hospitality and service industries, including hotels and other accommodations, have made progress in non-face-to-face customer service and labor-saving measures to minimize contact between staff and customers.
Even now that restrictions on movement have been lifted, demand for contactless, non-face-to-face customer service remains high due to factors such as rising employee wages caused by labor shortages and companies’ desire to keep costs down amidst rising prices.
The company has a track record of providing multilingual and digital transformation services to accommodations and service providers through multilingual communication tools for accommodations, but development of concierge services had been difficult due to the high standards required for this service, despite the high demand for it.
“We had heard requests for a concierge service that was both low-cost and high-quality for some time. However, when we tried to do it with conventional AI chatbots, the quality did not come close to what guests expected, so we initially gave up on the idea. Then ChatGPT came along, and it became possible to provide a service that exceeded guests’ expectations, so we were finally able to launch this service,” said Genri Goto, CEO of Kotozna.
Traditionally, obtaining accurate answers from unmanned chatbots required questioners to specify the scope of the answer or provide additional information. However, Kotozna ConcierGPT can understand the context and provide appropriate responses that capture the customer’s underlying needs, even to questions such as “What kinds of rooms are available?” or “What are some recommended ways to spend a 3-day summer vacation?”
While its current functionality is limited to supporting hotel and inn reservations, the company plans to expand it to cover a wide range of hotel operations and develop it into a new platform that provides high-quality multilingual customer service to various businesses in other industries.
“This time it’s a concierge for hotels, but in the future we want to expand it to a wide range of tourism services, such as tourist information centers. Also, (in the long term) I think it can be used for all customer services, so we want to make it available for use in call centers, customer centers, and contact centers,” says Genri Goto, CEO of Kotozna.
This AI concierge has been piloted at Southern Beach Hotel & Resort Okinawa in Itoman City, Okinawa Prefecture since May of this year, ahead of its full-scale service launch. According to Mr. Goto, so far it has received positive feedback, with comments such as, “It’s completely different from previous chatbots, and I was surprised by how natural the responses were.”
Article by: Yusei Higuchi Edited by: Takanori Isshiki
Top video: Provided by Kotozna. Top image: From Kotozna website and Southern Beach Hotel & Resort Okinawa.
For inquiries regarding this article, please contact jstories@pacificbridge.jp.
The English version of this article can be found here .
