DFW Airport to Put Virtual Humans in Every Terminal
IBM and Soul Machines team up to create Digital Iris
Dallas Fort Worth (DFW) airport tapped Soul Machines and IBM to deploy a kiosk inhabited by a digital person to help travelers earlier this year. IBM’s media release depicted the solution as:
Digital Iris provides travelers with up-to-the-minute, location-based information on Flight and Gate Information, Restaurant Information, Interactive Map Detail, Airport Support, and Service Details, all with empathy and engagement. Completely touchless, Digital Iris elevates the customer experience with voice-controlled, on-demand answers to questions in a way similar to how passengers would naturally interact with a human airport representative. Digital Iris’ likeness and animation were created by Soul Machines and its speech and artificial intelligence were built using IBM’s Watson Assistant technology. While Soul Machines provides Digital Iris’ subconscious AI, comprised of emotional detection and response as well as autonomous animation, Watson Assistant provides conscious AI response, such as understanding questions and providing responses.Since June, the trial implementation in Terminal B has assisted “thousands” of travelers. It was successful enough that DFW has already decided to expand the capability to every terminal.
Animating Digital People
Greg Cross, CEO of Soul Machines, said at the Synthedia conference that there are two key aspects of interactive digital humans. First, you must render the visual elements of the digital person. Second, you need to animate it.
The kiosk use case is a perfect example. The “hyper-realistic” avatar at DFW needs to be engaging visually, and it needs to be able to field a wide variety of questions formulated in an even wider variety of spoken requests. Soul Machines partnered with IBM to run the conversational elements of the DFW solution, which are augmented by emotion detection and expressive interactions delivered from Iris.
The Embodied Assistant
It is untenable to have real people everywhere to help answer traveler questions. And the centralized information desk has limitations on how many customers can be served at a time. It is far easier to duplicate kiosk locations to serve travelers more quickly. The same is true at theme parks, hotels, arenas, and many other venues.
However, airports are particularly difficult because waiting time and the need for information aren’t luxury good that contributes just to customer satisfaction, it can impact whether a passenger makes their flight. For that reason, the customer problem is a higher-stakes encounter.
Compounding this challenge is the lack of employees to even staff the customer assistance roles. The combination of these factors suggests that we are about to see a lot more kiosks manned by digital people over the next five years.
