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stickers as smooth as silk
Thai Airways launched two limited-edition sticker sets (supersized emoji packs) on Line, the messaging app popular in Thailand, Taiwan and Japan. It features caricatures of its pilots, flight attendants and aircraft saying: “OMG,” “thank you,” “love,” “sweet dreams” and “ha, ha, ha.”
classic board game Go. While easier to learn than chess (the game of choice to test AI), the game has around 10 times as many potential moves per turn, so it’s considered a stiffer test of an AI’s, well, intelligence. It’s a start, but Google is much further along. The Google AI, named DeepMind, has recently defeated the European Go champion in five straight games. Of course, you program a bot that’s smart enough to beat a grandmaster so that it can be smart enough to deal with a business traveler trying to change a complicated itinerary on the way to the airport. Your bot can’t just be good – it has to be great. The humans in charge of an airline’s instant messaging-based communications have to trust that their bots have their backs. Businesses have discovered instant messaging as a way to engage customers beyond the sales pitch. Passengers can communicate in a meaningful way with the airlines at any point in the journey without changing their chat habits. Meanwhile, airline employees have never had a better excuse to use their smartphones at their desks.
will flirt for followers
WOW Air, the Icelandic discount carrier, took to the dating app Tinder to announce its routes from Montreal and Toronto to Reykjavik, encouraging that flirting would increase the chances of scoring free flights. The airline used its Snapchat account to share some of the sexier exchanges.
whatsapp integration
Integrating customer service with the world’s most widely used messaging app, KLM tested a virtual assistant on WhatsApp with 100 of its frequent flyers, answering queries about upgrades and seat availability. The airline saw shorter and more frequent back and forth, akin to chatting with friends.
beat this, siri
XiaoIce is an intelligent personal assistant (IPA) developed by Microsoft for China Eastern Airlines. It allows passengers to connect to flight crew, other passengers, even friends on the ground. XiaoIce responds in a conversational tone similar to Apple’s Siri. The IPA has been adopted by WeChat and by Line, where it is known as Rinna.
Airline Passenger Experience Association
like support triage, complaint management and, eventually, sales funnels. The meteoric rise of productivity app Slack has also normalized chatbots, which have actually been around for a long time. Old-school Internet users likely remember IRC (Internet Relay Chat), and the creation of simple bots to help you work more efficiently. Now bots have gone prime time, alerting a company’s team members to changes in their social media and online support-desk environments. To be useful, though, a bot has to be “rather very intelligent.” Today, Facebook’s AI is getting close to besting an amateur human player at the
“If it provides value to the customer and the airline, it’s a win-win.” David Meyer Qantas
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