Hilton Guests Greeted By Robot Concierge

(RTTNews) - Step into a Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. (HLT) hotel and you may soon find your queries being answered by a humanoid robot that will act as a hotel concierge.

Hilton and IBM Corp. (IBM) are collaborating to pilot a small robot that will act as a hotel concierge.

The robot, named Connie after Hilton's founder Conrad Hilton, will work side-by-side with Hilton's team members to greet visitors and answer their questions about hotel amenities, services and hours of operation.

Connie will draw on domain knowledge from Watson and WayBlazer, a cognitive search platform focused on travel. It will inform guests on local tourist attractions, dining recommendations and hotel features as well as amenities.

This marks the first time IBM has developed a Watson-enabled robot for the hospitality market.

The robot, now stationed near reception at the Hilton McLean in Virginia, uses a combination of IBM's Watson machine-learning APIs, like dialogue, speech to text, text to speech and its natural language classifier.

WayBlazer's extensive travel domain knowledge powered by Watson will enable Connie to also suggest local attractions outside the hotel. The more guests interact with Connie, the more it will learn, adapt and improve its recommendations.

The robot is based on Nao, an autonomous, programmable humanoid robot developed by French robotics company Aldebaran Robotics. The French company is the maker of the well-known Pepper humanoid robot.