Conversational Interfaces: History, Evolution and Impact on Hospitality

Summary

As we will describe in this report, conversational interfaces are an example of AI-first technology. Their defining capabilities are in the natural language processing (NLP) algorithms that enable users to interact with the machine the way they would with another human. However, the quality of customer interaction with hospitality services that is enabled through conversational interfaces will depend not only on their technical sophistication and the accuracy of the NLP algorithms, the facets receiving the most press attention. As with any customer-facing initiative, the type of transactions enabled by the technology and the design of the experience are also critical to success. It’s best not to leave the latter to developers. Rather, in this phase of experience design, hotel operators must be directly involved, and in fact they should lead the charge. The main goal of this Innovation Edition article is to provide you with both a background on the technology and an analytical framework that can support the design of customer experiences enabled by conversational interfaces.