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"Intelligent" Avatars Poised To Manage Airline Check-In

Posted by samzenpus on from the even-better-than-the-real-thing dept.

An anonymous reader writes One of the developers behind special effects used in the film Avatar has inked a deal with airline check-in kiosk manufacturer BCS to implement avatars for personalized and interactive customer service. Dr Mark Sagar's Limbic IO is applying 'neurobehavioral animation' combining biologically based models of faces and neural systems to create live, naturally intelligent, and expressive interactive systems. "One of the comments levelled at self-service check in is that it has lost the human touch that people had when checking in at a traditional manned counter," Patrick Teo, BCS CEO says. "Travelling can be stressful and our aim is to make the interaction between human (passenger) and computer (check-in) as natural and helpful as possible."

13 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. nice job by alphatel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yes we all want interactive terminals at the airport. We are not at all concerned about waiting 1 hour to checks bags, another hour to get through security and a third useful hour spent waiting to board. No, let's get hyper-aggressive about how the computer looks at the airport.

    --
    When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
    1. Re:nice job by Albanach · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I don't think the OPs point was that the waits for check in and security are such that the miracle that is manned flight has been wasted upon us. Rather that if we are going to spend money (and yes any cost comes from tickets, so it's a collective we that will pay for this) perhaps there are other parts of the airport experience that would deliver a better return.

      Frankly when I have been able to use automated check in, the existing terminals have been pretty clear and efficient. They're certainly not the most stressful part of the flying experience.

    2. Re:nice job by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Aside from all that, it isn't clear why adding a shallow emulation of a talking human head is even going to improve the terminal experience:

      If you are dealing with a routine matter, you aren't really trying to convey that much data (and none of the data you are trying to convey are subtly emotionally nuanced or anything, it's basically an "I want to be on this flight, ideally in this seat, here's the billing info" operation, not a sonnet) and existing text and graphic based interfaces, while often questionably thought out, are at least as competent as a natural-language dialog for anyone who isn't illiterate or otherwise handicapped.

      If something or someone is fucked up and/or deeply confused, the computer won't be able to help you because it will just format and present the garbage you are trying to sort out. You need someone who can understand an edge case or error and has the power to give a good hard shove to whatever fields aren't cooperating.

      I'd bet nontrivial money that the effect of this 'advance' will be to make the experience worse: The licensing fees will be calibrated to be lower than human salaries; but the underlying system will still be far dumber and less flexible than the humans who it will replace (because why do we need so many desk staff now that our kiosks are so user friendly!?); so users whose problems were already solved will have, at best, a slightly more pleasant interaction, and the users with real problems will have to wait in a longer line for a more harried human to fix it.

      We all know how totally peachy-keen 'interactive voice recognition' systems have made interacting with call centers, and this is basically the same old shit with an animated face.

    3. Re:nice job by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The trouble with progress as a cure for stress is twofold:

      One, expectations tend to grow as fast, sometimes faster, than capabilities. Unless you are traveling without any connecting flights and on a very leisurely schedule, everyone's assumptions about where you'll be and when will be calibrated to 'your flight; but on time', so delays that would have faded into the noise historically will now throw you off.

      Perhaps more fundamentally it appears to be the powerlessness rather than the absolute time that stresses people out, and being at the mercy of complex systems run by other people is beautifully designed to rub your face in powerlessness. Technology has, of course, increased our absolute level of power by chiseling away at the domain of 'nope, go try placating the spirits or something'; but all those places where it used to be that nobody had any control, now somebody; but not you, has control and you can't quite shake the impression that they are jerking you around.

  2. There's something touching about that comment by astralagos · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "One of the comments levelled at self-service check in is that it has lost the human touch..." the solution of hiring more people will, of course, not be considered.

  3. Sigh. by ledow · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "One of the comments levelled at self-service check in is that it has lost the human touch that people had when checking in at a traditional manned counter,"

    So we're going to take away the last humans and replace them with mindless robots.

    Well done.

    Certainly aced that one.

    (As an aside, I've just come through London Stansted including an extra hour in the security queues which went all the way back to the gate when you come off the plane, and I spent much of it yelling and attracting the attention of people around me - my primary beef was that the humans had no humanity, nobody had bothered to go down the line, tell us what we were waiting for, how long it was expected to take, what they could do for special cases - young children, disabled passengers, elderly passengers unable to stand in queue, etc. - or would even bother to do anything to help or give answers.

    And when we got to the front, all the "electronic passport" aisles were gone and only the manned aisles were left. I know why they were removed - nobody uses them. They are too much a faff, you can't take children through them, if you're travelling with someone with a non-chipped passport, you have to separate and then wait (hope) blindly for each other on the other side, etc. so even when they were opened, less than 1% of the people there ever used them.

    Sorry, if you want the human touch, you have to put humans in there AND then listen to the humans queuing alongside them AND then let those humans sort each other's problems out. Reliance on machines? When I got to the long-stay car park to retrieve my car, it wouldn't let my (immaculately preserved) ticket through two different barriers, so I had to press the button and get someone to let me out, costing me another 10 minutes. Thank god that wasn't my passport at the end of a hour-long queue.

    1. Re:Sigh. by hawguy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "One of the comments levelled at self-service check in is that it has lost the human touch that people had when checking in at a traditional manned counter,"

      So we're going to take away the last humans and replace them with mindless robots.

      It's a self-service check-in, it's already a mindless robot.

      Though I fail to see how replacing the dumb kiosk with a more intelligent avatar will really make anything better, I don't really want the kiosk to ask me how my day is going, or tell me I better bundle up because it's going to be a cold day in Chicago, I just want to check in as quickly and easily as possible.

    2. Re:Sigh. by unrtst · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It's a self-service check-in, it's already a mindless robot.

      Though I fail to see how replacing the dumb kiosk with a more intelligent avatar will really make anything better, I don't really want the kiosk to ask me how my day is going, or tell me I better bundle up because it's going to be a cold day in Chicago, I just want to check in as quickly and easily as possible.

      This.

      Using some supposedly intelligent avatar instead of a clear, simple, and well designed UI ranks right up there with the automated call interfaces that ask you to speak your answers instead of pressing the number buttons on your phone. People complained because pushing numbers sucked; RCA was incorrect; we ended up with a system 10x's as frustrating that takes 3x's longer to operate.

      I've found the self-service check-in's to be rather good, but the physical integration of them has left a lot to be desired. IE. there is no line for them.. there's just a bunch of them scattered about. Then you still have to take your bags somewhere, and figuring out where that line is, and how it differs from the line that includes getting your ticket, is often a complete mess. You often have to wade back through all the folks wandering around the kiosks to find the front of the new line. It should be a LOT simpler and organized much better... though I'm sure this is a per-airport, and possibly per-airline, issue, so YMMV.

  4. The human touch by overshoot · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Thanks to a prosthetic knee, I get the "human touch" every time I fly. That's after a trip through the pornscanner and taking out all of my electronics and startingt them up, of course.

    As for the kiosks -- if you know what you're doing, the last thing that you need is the kind of condescending "help" that gets in the way of getting your freaking boarding pass.

    --
    Lacking <sarcasm> tags, /. substitutes moderation as "Troll."
  5. SOlution looking for a problem by sinij · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Lining up to get sexually assaulted, lining up to pay predatory fees, and then suffering many hours on a dirty plane in sardines-in-a-box seating plan are main concerns.

    If the problems above solved, I would gladly register using CLI, if necessary.

  6. AI just isn't up to it yet, by Iamthecheese · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Natural communication? In a crowded airport with a machine? Pull the other one, it squeaks.

    Artificial intelligence is nowhere near good enough to translate "I want an isle seat for my son and TIMMY STOP POKING YOUR SISTER, sorry, An isle seat for my son and I have a Delta flight from Dallas, can you make sure it will arrive in time to connect?" That's the kind of thing human attendants can cope with easily. The best kind of interface for ticketing is an unintelligent wizard on a touch screen with big icons and a "help" button for an attendant.

    --
    If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
  7. lost the human touch? by shadowrat · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The human is the weak link in the check in chain. The self check in terminals are fine, but fat lot of good it does when i still have to stand in a huge line just to have the human behind the desk put a sticker on my checked baggage. WTF is that about? weighing? certainly a scale could be present at the terminal, and until computer vision is reliable enough, a human could simply watch to make sure people arent just pretending to weigh their 80lbs luggage. Bombs? i thought that's what the TSA is for. Clearly the staff checking your ID is not the biggest stopgap in preventing bombs on board. Why can't the terminal simply spit out my baggage sticker for myself to put on?

  8. Clippy for checkin terminals? by Stewie241 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So is this basically clippy for checkin terminals?