Inside the Japanese Hotel Staffed by Female Robots
Robot-staffed hotels are popping up in Japan where you're checked in by friendly dinosaurs.
The lobby piano player has no soul either, quite literally.
Keep watching to find out more!
The Henn-na Hotel Staffed by multilingual robots (yes, robots),
travelers are sure to have a memorable stay at the Henn-na Hotel located in Nagasaki,
Japan.
Robots (one of which is an English-speaking dinosaur robot) serve to check guests in,
and porter robots will carry luggage up to the guest rooms.
Of course, human staff is also on hand for guests 24/7 should a problem arise, but robots
make up the primary staff - and, yes, you can talk to them.
One of the Japanese definitions of “henn” means “to change,” which represents the
hotel’s commitment “for evolution in striving for the extraordinary sensation and comfort
that lies beyond the ordinary.”
Another quirk of this innovative hotel is facial recognition; with keyless locking and
entry, guests need not worry about forgetting key cards during their stay.
However, if facial recognition technology isn’t your thing, you can request a card
key if you wish.
Travelers should note that there is no restaurant or room service/microwaves at the Henn-na
Hotel.
However, there is a restaurant within walking distance.
The concept of the hotel is to provide the minimum necessary to remove “useless amenities.”
But don’t fret - there’s free WiFi!
Until last year, if you had checked into the Henn na Hotel in Japan you’d have had a
staff of 243 robots at your disposal.
From the nodding velociraptor and humanoid “manning” the front desk, to the recycling
bin droid that roamed the corridors and the chatty in-room artificial intelligence (AI)
concierge, the world’s first robot hotel even had mechanised fish swimming around a
tank in the lobby.
World’s First Robot-Staffed Hotel The Henn na, which loosely translates as “strange”,
opened in Nagasaki in 2015 with a whirlwind of publicity.
It was seen as a template for the future.
A robot-staffed hotel could offer a fun and original experience for guests, while providing
huge savings on staff costs for hotel owners.
“From an operational costs point of view, it was quite a brilliant thing,” says Dr
Nick Naumov, senior lecturer in tourism and hospitality management at the University of
Northampton and visiting professor at Meikai University in Tokyo Bay, who specialises in
how AI and robots affect service quality in hotels.
“They started off employing 30 human staff for 140 rooms, which could be 300 guests.
And when things went well initially, they brought that down to seven staff, which is
a really good ratio.”
The fact hat this robot hotel originated in Japan, a nation which exports more industrial
robots than any other and has long been ahead of the curve in robotics technology and innovation,
chimed with the narrative perfectly.
Shortly after its opening, Henn na’s owner Hideo Sawada cited the country’s love of
anime and manga robots as inspiration for the hotel.
He went on to predict: “In five to ten years, this kind of robot hotel will spread all over
the world.”
The company did open another hotel, at Urayasu in Tokyo Bay, and at one point had another
eight robot hotels in the pipeline.
But these plans never materialised and in January 2019 Henn na cut more than half its
robot workforce.
Strange Hotel Rings Robot Staff Redundancies At first guests had loved the novelty of the
robot hotel experience and the colour it brought to their social feeds, but before long things
started to go wrong.
The robotic dinosaur and humanoid on the front desk could only speak one language each, English
and Japanese respectively.
Later Mandarin and Korean were added, but that still left many guests wrestling to be
understood, including a Scottish man, who documented his experience on YouTube.
The robots also struggled with the different passport and identity-card formats and photocopying
the documentation, so human staff constantly had to step in.
Guests grew frustrated with the in-room voice assistant called Churi.
It could cope with basic commands, such as turning the lights on and off, but appeared
primitive when asked more sophisticated queries, such as flight schedules or theme park opening
times by guests accustomed to voice AI at a level offered by Google Home, Alexa and
Siri.
Churi would also confuse snoring as a voice command and issue a perky response that would
wake guests up.
The hotel had to raise its staff count to deal with the escalating complaints, plus
the robots themselves required an increasing amount of expensive maintenance.
As Naumov says: “Just like any other tech, they needed regular servicing and constant
software updates, and those things aren’t cheap.”
According to one hotel guest, following a visit in 2016: “About half the puppy-size
lobby dancers appeared to be broken or in need of charging.”
And after the hotel cut its robot workforce, a long-time staff member was quoted as saying:
“It’s easier now that we’re not being frequently called by guests to help with problems
with the robots.”
The Future of Robot Staff and AI in the Hotel Industry
It’s not a question of whether customer service AI is valuable in a hotel setting,
as it clearly is.
But according to Dr Björn Schuller, professor of AI at Imperial College London, whose expertise
includes affective computing, or the science of AI and emotion, what happened at Henn na
Hotel reminds us to think about which applications AI is suitable for and which it isn’t: tech
realism over tech optimism.
“Where a bot is most useful is not in place of a social context, but when you want precise
information in as short a time as possible or to save you waiting for something,” he
says.
Some of the most successful robots in hotels do just that, for example Hilton’s Connie,
which employs IBM’s Watson AI software to provide personalized information about visitor
attractions, restaurant recommendations and direct guests around the hotel.
While other big-name hotel chains, such as the Marriott and Yotel, use robot butlers
for speedy, but rudimentary, room service requests, such as fetching a towel, coffee
or sandwich.
By using robots for room service and other entry-level tasks, such as cleaning and luggage
transportation, which were both done by robots at Henn na, Naumov points out you improve
efficiency, but also free up the human staff to welcome guests, handle complaints and deal
with other crucial customer service needs.
“The human touch will never disappear,” he says, adding that human-centred service
may become “the new currency of luxury hospitality in the future”.
This could mean low-cost hotels running largely on service automation, robotics and AI with
a skeleton staff, while expensive hotels retain a large, visible human workforce.
The Right Kind of Robot for a Robot Hotel There is also the question of trust.
We might believe a human concierge is giving us the inside scoop on the best local restaurants
or places to withdraw cash with a good rate, even if they’re not, but a robot would always
put the hotel’s agenda first.
As Schuller says: “In the future a robot will always give you better information than
a human, as they won’t forget things and they’ll be fully updated with the latest
news, but then it becomes a matter of trust.
A human can pretend they’re doing you a favour, even risking their job to do so, but
we know a robot will always be on the company’s side.”
Unlike robot hotel Henn na’s front-desk humanoid, the Hilton and Marriott droids all
look like typical robots, as imagined in 1980s films and TV, as opposed to human-like iterations,
which some people find disquieting.
In a low-cost hotel, we might not mind an unmanned check-in desk with facial recognition
sensors, or to use our mobile phone as a room key, if it saves us time and money.
But to have a humanoid overseeing that function adds a layer of alienation to the experience
that we might not have noticed otherwise.
However, the right kind of robot can become a star attraction.
This happened in Belgium at Ghent, when Mario from the Marriott became a minor celebrity,
visiting local schools, football clubs and even giving speeches at welcome and farewell
events.
And with conversational AI set to get smarter and even more “charismatic”, according
to Schuller, over the next few years hotels may be able to capitalise on this through
creation of celebrity AI to attract guests and which could be combined with robotics
technology.
As Schuller adds: “Once we have natives of socially and emotionally intelligent AI,
this digitally advanced generation of consumers could have a whole different level of perception.
Maybe they’d seek out AI with different personality attributes, famous AI for example,
to give them kudos.”
Just as long as the AI can spot the difference between snoring and talking.
That’s all for this video, folks!
See you another time!