AI - Smart Hotels And Smart Hotel Rooms.

In a competitive tourist sector, high-tech and artificial intelligence are being used by luxury hotels to deliver the greatest experience for their visitors and grow their market share.

The experience economy, as it is known in the hospitality management business, is shaping artificial intelligence in hotels.

An experience is created by three major players: a product, a service, and a consumer.

The artifacts presented in the marketplaces are known as products.

Services are the concrete and intangible benefits of a single product, or a collection of goods, as marketed by frontline staff via a procedure.

The end user of these items or services is the client.

Customers are looking for items and services that will meet their requirements.

Hoteliers, on the other hand, must develop extraordinary events that transform manufactured goods and services into real experiences for their consumers in order to emotionally connect with them.

In this approach, experiences become a fungible activity in the market with the goal of retaining clients.

Robotics, data analysis, voice activation, face recognition, virtual and augmented reality, chatbots, and the internet of things are all examples of artificial intelligence in the luxury hotel business (IoT).

Smart rooms are created for hotel guests by providing automated technology that naturally solves their typical demands.

Guests may utilize IoT to control the lights, curtains, speakers, and television in their rooms through a connected tablet.

• When a person is awake and moving about, a nightlight system may detect this.
• Wellness gadgets that deliver sensory experiences are available in certain rooms for disabled visitors.
• Smart rooms may capture personal information from customers and keep it in customer profiles in order to give better service during subsequent visits.

In terms of smart room technology, the Hilton and Marriott worldwide luxury hotel companies are industry leaders.

One of Hilton's initial goals is to provide guests the ability to operate their room's features using their smartphone.

• Guests may customize their stay according to their preferences utilizing familiar technologies in this manner.
• Lights, TVs, the temperature, and the entertainment (streaming) service are all adjustable in typical Hilton smart rooms (Ting 2017).
• A second goal is to provide services via mobile phone apps.
• During their stay, guests may put their own preferences.
• They may, for example, choose digital artwork or images from the room's display.
• Voice activation services are presently being developed for Hilton smart bedrooms (Burge 2017).

Marriott's smart rooms were created in collaboration with Legrand's Eliot technology and Samsung's Artik guest experience platform.

Marriott has deployed cloud-based hotel IoT technologies (Ting 2017).

Two prototype rooms for testing new smart systems have come from this partnership.

The first is a room with smart showers, mirrors, art frames, and speakers that is totally networked.

• Guests may use voice commands to operate the lighting, air conditioning, curtains, paintings, and television.
• A touchscreen shower is available, allowing visitors to write on the smart glass of the shower.
• Shower notes may be turned into papers and sent to a specific address (Business Traveler 2018).
• The quantity of oxygen in this Marriott room is controlled by sensors that monitor the number of people in the suite.
• These sensors also help visitors wake up in the middle of the night by displaying the time to get out of bed and lighting the path to the restroom (Ting 2017).
• A loyalty account allows guests to select their particular preferences ahead to arrival.

A second, lower-tech area is linked through tablet and just has the Amazon Dot voice-controlled smart speaker.

• The television remote may be used to change the room's characteristics.
• The benefit of this room is that it has very few implementation requirements (Ting 2017).
• Hoteliers point to a number of benefits of smart rooms in addition to convenience and customization.
• Smart rooms help to protect the environment by lowering energy consumption expenses.
• They may also save money on wages by reducing the amount of time housekeeping and management spend with visitors.

Smart rooms have their own set of constraints.

It may be tough to grasp certain smart technology.

• For starters, the learning curve for overnight visitors is rather short.
• Second, the infrastructure and technology required for these rooms continues to be prohibitively costly.
• Even if there are long-term cost and energy benefits, the initial investment expenses are significant.

Finally, there's the issue of data security.

Hotels must continue to evolve to meet the needs of new generations of paying customers.

Technology is deeply interwoven in the everyday behaviors of millennials and post-millennials.

Their smart phones, video games, and tablets are transforming the meaning of experience in a virtual world.

Luxury tourism already includes high-priced goods and services that are supported by cutting-edge technology.

The quality of future hotel smart room experiences will be influenced by visitor income levels and personal technological capabilities, creating new competitive marketplaces.

Customers expect high-tech comfort and service from hotels.

Hotel operators gain from smart rooms as well, since they serve as a source of large data.

Companies are rapidly collecting, storing, and using all accessible information on their customers in order to provide unique goods and services.

This technique aids businesses in creating twenty-first-century markets in which technology is as important as hotel guests and management.

~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

Find Jai on Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram

You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.

See also: 

Smart Cities and Homes.

References & Further Reading:

Burge, Julia. 2017. “Hilton Announces ‘Connected Room,’ The First Mobile-Centric Hotel Room, To Begin Rollout in 2018.” Hilton Press Center, December 7, 2017. https://newsroom.hilton.com/corporate/news/hilton-announces-connected-room-the-first-mobilecentric-hotel-room-to-begin-rollout-in-2018.

Business Traveler. 2018. “Smart Rooms.” Business Traveler (Asia-Pacific Edition), 11.

Imbardelli, A. Patrick. 2019. “Smart Guestrooms Can Transform Hotel Brands.” Hotel Management 234, no. 3 (March): 40.

Pine, B. Joseph, II, and James H. Gilmore. 1998. “Welcome to the Experience Economy.” Harvard Business Review 76, no. 4 (July–August): 97–105.

Swaminathan, Sundar. 2017. Oracle Hospitality Hotel 2025 Industry Report. Palm Beach Gardens, FL: International Luxury Hotel Association.

Ting, Deanna. 2017. “Hilton and Marriott Turn to the Internet of Things to Transform the Hotel Room Experience.” Skift, November 14, 2017. https://skift.com/2017/11/14/hilton-and-marriott-turn-to-the-internet-of-things-to-transform-the-hotel-room-experience/.

AI - Smart Homes And Smart Cities.

 

Projects to develop the infrastructure for smart cities and houses are involving public authorities, professionals, businessmen, and residents all around the world.

These smart cities and houses make use of information and communication technology (ICT) to enhance quality of life, local and regional economies, urban planning and transportation, and government.

Urban informatics is a new area that gathers data, analyzes patterns and trends, and utilizes the information to implement new ICT in smart cities.

Data may be gathered from a number of different sources.

Surveillance cameras, smart cards, internet of things sensor networks, smart phones, RFID tags, and smart meters are just a few examples.

In real time, any kind of data may be captured.

Passenger occupancy and flow may be used to obtain data on mass transit utilization.

Road sensors can count cars on the road or in parking lots.

They may also use urban machine vision technologies to determine individual wait times for local government services.

From public thoroughfares and sidewalks, license plate numbers and people's faces may be identified and documented.

Tickets may be issued, and statistics on crime can be gathered.

The information gathered in this manner may be compared to other big datasets on neighborhood income, racial and ethnic mix, utility reliability statistics, and air and water quality indices.

Artificial intelligence (AI) may be used to build or improve city infrastructure.

Stop signal frequencies at crossings are adjusted and optimized based on data acquired regarding traffic movements.

This is known as intelligent traffic signaling, and it has been found to cut travel and wait times, as well as fuel consumption, significantly.

Smart parking structures assist cars in quickly locating available parking spaces.

Law enforcement is using license plate identification and face recognition technologies to locate suspects and witnesses at crime scenes.

Shotspotter, a business that triangulates the position of gunshots using a sensor network placed in special streetlights, tracked and informed police agencies to over 75,000 bullets fired in 2018.

Information on traffic and pedestrian deaths is also being mined via big data initiatives.

Vision Zero is a global highway safety initiative that aspires to decrease road fatalities to zero.

Data analysis using algorithms has resulted in road safety efforts as well as road redesign that has saved lives.

Cities have also been able to respond more swiftly to severe weather occurrences because to ubiquitous sensor technology.

In Seattle, for example, conventional radar data is combined with RainWatch, a network of rain gauges.

Residents get warnings from the system, and maintenance staff are alerted to possible problem places.

Transport interconnection enabling completely autonomous autos is one long-term aim for smart cities.

At best, today's autonomous cars can monitor their surroundings to make judgments and avoid crashes with other vehicles and numerous road hazards.

However, cars that connect with one another in several directions are likely to create fully autonomous driving systems.

Collisions are not only averted, but also prevented in these systems.

Smart cities are often mentioned in conjunction with smart economy initiatives and foreign investment development by planners.

Data-driven entrepreneurial innovation, as well as productivity analyses and evaluation, might be indicators of sensible economic initiatives.

Some smart towns want to emulate Silicon Valley's success.

Neom, Saudi Arabia, is one such project.

It is a proposed megacity city that is expected to cost half a trillion dollars to build.

Artificial intelligence is seen as the new oil in the city's ambitions, despite sponsorship by Saudi Aramco, the state-owned petroleum giant.

Everything will be controlled by interconnected computer equipment and future artificial intelligence decision-making, from home technology to transportation networks and electronic medical record distribution.

One of Saudi Arabia's most significant cultural activities—monitoring the density and pace of pilgrims around the Kaaba in Mecca—has already been entrusted to AI vision technologies.

The AI is intended to avert a disaster on the scale of the 2015 Mina Stampede, which claimed the lives of 2,000 pilgrims.

The use of highly data-driven and targeted public services is another trademark of smart city programs.

Information-driven agencies are frequently referred to as "smart" or "e-government" when they work together.

Open data projects to encourage openness and shared engagement in local decision-making might be part of smart governance.

Local governments will collaborate with contractors to develop smart utility networks for the provision of electricity, telecommunications, and the internet.

Waste bins are linked to the global positioning system and cloud servers, alerting vehicles when garbage is ready for pickup, allowing for smart waste management and recycling initiatives in Barcelona.

Lamp poles have been converted into community wi-fi hotspots or mesh networks in certain areas to provide pedestrians with dynamic lighting safety.

Forest City in Malaysia, Eko Atlantic in Nigeria, Hope City in Ghana, Kigamboni New City in Tanzania, and Diamniadio Lake City in Senegal are among the high-tech centres proposed or under development.

Artificial intelligence is predicted to be the brain of the smart city in the future.

Artificial intelligence will personalize city experiences to match the demands of specific inhabitants or tourists.

Through customized glasses or heads-up displays, augmented systems may give virtual signs or navigational information.

Based on previous use and location data, intelligent smartphone agents are already capable of predicting user movements.

Artificial intelligence technologies are used in smart homes in a similar way.

Google Home and other smart hubs now integrate with over 5,000 different types of smart gadgets sold by 400 firms to create intelligent environments in people's homes.

Amazon Echo is Google Home's main rival.

These kinds of technologies can regulate heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, as well as lighting and security, as well as household products like smart pet feeders.

In the early 2000s, game-changing developments in home robotics led to widespread consumer acceptance of iRobot's Roomba vacuum cleaner.

Obsolescence, proprietary protocols, fragmented platforms and interoperability issues, and unequal technological standards have all plagued such systems in the past.

Machine learning is being pushed forward by smart houses.

Smart technology' analytical and predictive capabilities are generally regarded as the backbone of one of the most rapidly developing and disruptive commercial sectors: home automation.

To function properly, the smarter connected home of the future needs collect fresh data on a regular basis in order to develop.

Smart houses continually monitor the interior environment and use aggregated past data to establish settings and functionalities in buildings with smart components installed.

Smart houses may one day anticipate their owners' requirements, such as automatically changing blinds as the sun and clouds move across the sky.

A smart house may produce a cup of coffee at precisely the correct time, order Chinese takeout, or play music based on the resident's mood as detected by emotion detectors.

Pervasive, sophisticated technologies are used in smart city and household AI systems.

The benefits of smart cities are many.

Smart cities pique people's curiosity because of its promise for increased efficiency and convenience.

It's enticing to live in a city that anticipates and easily fulfills personal wants.

Smart cities, however, are not without their detractors.

Smart havens, if left uncontrolled, have the ability to cause major privacy invasion via continuous video recording and microphones.

Google contractors might listen to recordings of exchanges with users of its famous Google Assistant artificial intelligence system, according to reports in 2019.

The influence of smart cities and households on the environment is yet unknown.

Biodiversity considerations are often ignored in smart city ideas.

Critical habitat is routinely destroyed in order to create space for the new cities that tech entrepreneurs and government officials desire.

Conventional fossil-fuel transportation methods continue to reign supreme in smart cities.

The future viability of smart homes is likewise up in the air.

A recent research in Finland found that improved metering and consumption monitoring did not successfully cut smart home power use.

In reality, numerous smart cities that were built from the ground up are now almost completely empty.

Many years after their initial construction, China's so-called ghost cities, such as Ordos Kangbashi, have attained occupancy levels of one-third of all housing units.

Despite direct, automated vacuum waste collection tubes in individual apartments and building elevators timed to the arrival of residents' automobiles, Songdo, Korea, an early "city in a box," has not lived up to promises.

Smart cities are often portrayed as impersonal, elitist, and costly, which is the polar opposite of what the creators intended.

Songdo exemplifies the smart city trend in many aspects, with its underpinning structure of ubiquitous computing technologies that power everything from transportation systems to social networking channels.

The unrivaled integration and synchronization of services is made possible by the coordination of all devices.

As a result, by turning the city into an electronic panopticon or surveillance state for observing and controlling residents, the city simultaneously weakens the protective advantages of anonymity in public settings.

Authorities studying smart city infrastructures are now fully aware of the computational biases of proactive and predictive policing.

~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

Find Jai on Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram

You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.

See also: 

Biometric Privacy and Security; Biometric Technology; Driverless Cars and Trucks; Intelligent Transportation; Smart Hotel Rooms.

References & Further Reading:

Albino, Vito, Umberto Berardi, and Rosa Maria Dangelico. 2015. “Smart Cities: Definitions, Dimensions, Performance, and Initiatives.” Journal of Urban Technology 22, no. 1: 3–21.

Batty, Michael, et al. 2012. “Smart Cities of the Future.” European Physical Journal Special Topics 214, no. 1: 481–518.

Friedman, Avi. 2018. Smart Homes and Communities. Mulgrave, Victoria, Australia: Images Publishing.

Miller, Michael. 2015. The Internet of Things: How Smart TVs, Smart Cars, Smart Homes, and Smart Cities Are Changing the World. Indianapolis: Que.

Shepard, Mark. 2011. Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space. New York: Architectural League of New York.

Townsend, Antony. 2013. Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.