A Digital Companion for Air Travelers

Digital voice assistants (e.g., Alexa, and Siri) have increased users’ acceptance and expectations in getting immediate help from smart agents available in smartphones and IoT devices. However, such assistants are capable of performing simple tasks that can be accomplished with specific commands, and minimum user interaction, e.g., “play some music”. A Digital Companion goes beyond assisting to complete a task upon request, a Digital Companion knows its users, the environment they interact with, and their relationship with other users, it learns with time, gathers information from heterogenous sources, analyzes it, and provides relevant and suitable information and recommendations about available services. Thus, a Digital Companion frees users from redundant, boring tasks; allowing them to focus on the meaningful parts of their activities. In this paper, an instance of a Digital Companion is presented, which combines semantic technologies and speech recognition to provide air travelers with a tool that enhances their experience at airports.