Alibaba enters hotel business with self serving robot
China's largest e-commerce site, Alibaba. They decided to start a hotel business from now. According to Glotechtrends, they will be partnered with Marriott and will start smart hotel experiments at "The Westin Hainan Island Sanya".
The serving robot will be a shop inside the hall.
The name of the robot is Space Egg. It is an aluminum body and has an egg shape design like SF. Let's see how it actually works, a video was taken by design-boom.
The guest room is equipped with a smart speaker [T-Mall Geeney] and speaks as room service. What you asked for is brought to you by Space Egg. To open the storage place, just hold your hand. And when all the items of the order are packed in, it will move automatically to the guest room.
Space Egg has a Wi-Fi connection, which also operates the elevator. A face authentication system is also installed, and it does not discriminate guests. If you get on the elevator you will greet.
A robot with a height of about 90 cm has a built-in camera and laser to automatically obstruct obstacles. The speed will be moving inside the building at 1 m/s. When arriving in the room, it is a rough mechanism that indoor speakers will let you know.
It developed was Alibaba's laboratory " Alibaba AI Labs ". This does not deprive human's work, but it is made with the task of assisting. As it is just holding meals, blankets etc, for now, it seems to be very helpful for the human side.
Space Egg debuts quickly, and if it succeeds at the hotel, then trying to spread it to hospitals and restaurants as well.
"T-Mall Geeney" is the most popular smart speaker in China, selling over 5 million units since its launch in 2017. In the world's smart speaker market the shipments are the third place. And at Glotechtrends, this "T-Mall Geeney" is like Alexa and it seems to do the operation of guest room lighting, air conditioner, air purifier, TV and music by voice commands.
Although it is limited to the suite now, it seems that we plan to deploy it to all rooms in the building while repeating the experiment and plan to deploy it to 100,000 rooms in China in the future.
