Kinki Nippon Tourist (KNT), one of the Japanese leading travel companies, will begin a new voice translation service to lease a desktop robot ‘Sota (made by Vstone)’ and tablet-based ‘Robot Concierge’ to tourism providers including city hotel, business hotel, capsule hotel, ryokan or tourist information office in cooperation with FueTrek, a one-stop company of speech recognition, speech synthesis, dialogue and machine translation solutions.
The voice translation service comprises the FueTrek databases for both travel and business conversations to deal with tourism providers’ daily business and communication with foreign travelers. One of the features is that service is based on an exclusive platform for tourism dialogue, and local tourist information may be included in the service in the future.
KNT will start the service in January 2016 after demonstration tests in Marriot Miyako Hotel Osaka and Sheraton Miyako Hotel Tokyo. In addition to the desktop robot, the same service with a wearable device may be available in the future.
The world’s voice translation market is forecasted to grow by 19.02% a year, and the market in Japan is expected to grow faster toward Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic in 2020, according to KNT.
In Japanese
