CityTalk Tokyo 2020

With CityTalk, robots can give information for tourists about local hotels and restaurants. The robot switches domains based on what you say, for example telling about hotels using a local hotel database if you ask about hotels, then telling about restaurants using a local restaurant database if you ask about restaurants.

The robot tells about hotels and restaurants near Tokyo 2020 Olympics (Youtube).

This video shows a robot giving information about hotels and restaurants in the Tokyo Waterfront area, where the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and Paralympics will be held in 2021.

In the video the robot and the human have a continuous dialogue that lasts for about 10 minutes. In the first part, the robot gives price information about hotels in the Tokyo Waterfront area in three different price ranges.

After the user asks about restaurants, the robot switches domains from hotels to restaurants. Then the human and the robot have a prolonged interaction in the second part of the video, about several different restaurants in the Tokyo Waterfront area that serve different types of food and are in different price ranges.

This prolonged interaction includes examples of speech recognition errors and of switching domains incorrectly, but the dialogue does not break down. During the course of the dialogue the robot provides descriptions, addresses and phone numbers for all the different types of restaurants that the user is interested in.

CityTalk was developed by CDM Interact Oy, a Finnish startup company founded by Graham Wilcock and Kristiina Jokinen in 2016. A demo and a paper about CityTalk were presented at 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2018) in Stockholm, Sweden.