Connie, world’s first hotel concierge robot, in service

The firm also entered an agreement with KPMG, a global provider of auditing, tax and advisory services, to provide cognitive-powered insights for capital and financial markets.
All these applications have benefited from a new era of computing and machine learning in which vast amounts of data can be leveraged instantly to facilitate the best-possible evidence-based decision-making in various fields.
In hospitality, the pilot project started on March 9 at the Hilton McLean hotel in the US state of Virginia, where the Connie robot was stationed to greet and help guests. Connie capitalises on domain knowledge from IBM Watson and WayBlazer, a cognitive travel recommendation engine, to provide guests with local tourist attractions, dining recommendations and hotel features as well as amenities.
In fact, Connie, named after Hilton’s founder Conrad Hilton, works side by side with real-life hotel staff to serve visitors better by personalising the guest experience and empowering them with more information so that they can plan their trips better.
The robot also learns to interact with guests and respond to their questions in a friendly manner – thanks to its machine-learning capability. According to IBM Watson, it uses dialogue, speech-to-text, text-to-speech and natural-language-classifier interfaces to enable it to greet guests upon arrival and to answer questions about hotel amenities, services and operating hours.
It also uses WayBlazer’s travel-domain knowledge to recommend local tourist attractions outside the hotel.
More important, the more guests interact with Connie, the more it learns and adapts to improve suggestions.
Jonathan Wilson, vice president of Hilton Worldwide, said the collaboration with IBM allowed the hotel chain to re-imagine the entire travel experience to make it smarter, easier and more enjoyable for guests.
In healthcare, Thailand’s Bumrungrad Hospital was one of the world’s first hospitals to use IBM Watson for Oncology, a cognitive computing system for cancer treatment, which also works together with real-life doctors to provide better service to patients.
Fredrik Tunvall, senior client-engagement leader at New York-based IBM Watson, said Bumrungrad, the largest private hospital facility in Southeast Asia, started to use the system about a year ago and it went live in January.
This has resulted in faster and more accurate evidence-based treatment options for Thai and foreign cancer patients as Bumrungrad is also well known internationally, according to Tunvall.
Bumrungrad, which has about 40 cancer doctors, also benefits from the expertise of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering, a leading cancer centre, which helps train the cognitive computing system in partnership with IBM Watson.
In practice, Bumrungrad’s doctors feed patient profiles and existing medical evidence into the cognitive system which then works through huge amounts of data, including 23 million cancer-treatment and related documents to come up with a reliable ranking of evidenced-based options for each of the patients.
 This allows doctors to make the best-possible decision for their patients, Tunvall said, adding that computing has entered the new era of machine-learning algorithms in which a system can be trained for specific areas and dataset curated for qualitative purposes.
In other words, computers with machine-learning capability help humans make faster and more accurate decisions, thus possibly extending the power of all human activities.
Besides hospitality and healthcare, IBM Watson has embarked on applying its cognitive-computing know-how in professional financial services by collaborating with KPMG to extend the human capability in the analysis of financial and operational data that are crucial to the health of organisations and capital markets around the world.
“Auditing and similar knowledge services are increasingly challenged with tackling immense volumes of unstructured data. Cognitive technology can transform how this data is understood and how critical decisions are made,” said John Kelly, senior vice president of IBM Research, adding that this will help clients gain new insights from vast amounts of information.
The collaboration also allows auditors to teach the computer how to fine-tune assessments over time, enabling auditing teams to have faster access to more precise measurements that help examine anomalies and assess whether additional steps are necessary.