Generative AI - Coming soon to kiosks

Generative AI: Coming soon to a kiosk near you

Author – Evan Schuman, ComputerWorld columnist

The most talked about technology this year–generative AI, which is behind ChatGPT, BingChat, Google Bard and dozens of other implementations–is likely to be talking right from the speaker of most kiosks quite soon. With some simple limitations to avoid it hallucinating the kiosk into big trouble, GenAI could take kiosk interactivity way beyond what exists in kiosks today.

Anand Muralidaran, the head of global growth strategy and AI business development at NVIDIA, sees GenAI taking kiosk communication skills to the next few levels.

“These lifelike avatars can see, perceive, intelligently converse, provide recommendations, and finalize orders through payment processing and send requests to the kitchen for production. Digital humans/avatars have come a long way in the past few years in being able to see, talk, add gestures and converse on top of the ever-growing LLMs. ChatGPT showed the world what LLMs can do in processing long, complex statements and requests,” Muralidaran wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Imagine a Disney/Pixar movie character avatar interfacing and taking orders. Children love to interact with the characters from their favorite movies and the virality of the experience is a big opportunity for the brand. The ability to create custom avatars to various themes like sports, movies and current affairs could have an enormous impact on how customers relate to a brand and perceive the experience they get. This would give the branding and marketing functions a leg-up in positioning their brands and value to customers in a completely different light.”

Another avenue for kiosk modernization through GenAI–along with other technologies–is to simply make them better at analyzing data to deliver more useful information to a kiosk user.

Consider a kiosk in the lobby of a hotel chain. What if a guest could enter the lobby, approach the kiosk and–before the user has touched the keyboard or the screen–an RFID badge or a linked mobile device scanning a QR code initiates an automatic check-in?, asks Tomer Mann, the chief revenue officer at 22Miles.

The GenAI-powered kiosk “could show them certain datapoints, such as whether their room is available yet and, if not, when it will be ready. For a conference room, it might say that the projector in that room isn’t working and offer to switch to a room where the projector does work,” Mann said. “It is connected to the guest’s activities for that day and that’s where things are changing. It’s machine learning based on you, showing live content fully in context. You would no longer have to get to your room to find that nothing is working.”

Another impressive GenAI-powered kiosk capability would be automatic and instantaneous language recognition and response. No longer would the user have to choose a language manually–and the number of languages supported could be dozens of times larger.

To avoid the problems with hallucinations–aka when the system makes stuff up–the kiosk would be programmed with a lengthy (but limited) number of responses it can share. But the magic is that the questions to trigger those finite response could be close to infinite.

“The user can ask questions a million different ways and the kiosk could always answer. That was never possible before, but with generative AI, it’s possible,” Mann said. “It will be able to handle cadence, slang, accents, regional phrasing differences, etc. The kiosk would have to keep all answer on-script, but that the user is free to ask what they want however they want and the learning system will figure it out.”

More on 22 Miles and AI

Click for full size – 22miles winner

22Miles created an AI Assistant for InfoComm23, which won us a Best of Show award from Digital Signage magazine. The AI enhanced tradeshow app provided attendees with a conversational interactive experience to find locations and events. You can take the app for a test drive on our website. https://22miles.ai/ [Editors note: we want to point out too that the Best of Show list included other members LG and Samsung (their new Windows kiosk. Both had multiple winners.).

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