At the summer Olympic Games in Tokyo this July, athletes may be competing for attention with all the impressive tech on display, including self-driving taxis and a robot village. But this showcase of tech prowess isn’t limited to the stadiums—All Nippon Airways (ANA), Japan’s largest airline, has been busy developing various travel-focused technologies to be used across the nation’s airports as well as in Toyko’s shopping centers and tourist attractions.
With the Olympic Games expected to drive an increase in foreign visitors this summer (as long as they’re not canceled due to the coronavirus), ANA recognized that a greater effort would be needed for its ground staff to communicate effectively with all passengers—in Japan’s airports, announcements are usually made only in Japanese or English. In December last year, ANA rolled out Pocketalk, a smaller-than-your-smartphone, AI-powered translation device that works with 74 languages, for use at the boarding gates and lobby of Osaka International Airport. Featuring a touchscreen and noise-canceling mics, the device can also handle certain dialects, slang, and idiomatic phrases.
Shinichi Abe, ANA’s chief airport operations officer, says the device is proving to be especially useful in providing timely information in unexpected situations, such as sudden cancelations or delays. By the end of March, the device will be in the hands of ANA ground staff in all 50 airports in Japan served by ANA. If Pocketalk performs well, ANA plans to implement the device aboard ANA flights and in airports outside Japan.
It’s clear why ANA would want to make it easier for its employees to communicate with passengers and with each other while on board. But it also fits into the company’s larger strategy around using tech to making flying more inclusive—and bring in more passengers. Shinya Katanozaka, the president and CEO of ANA Holdings (ANA HD), ANA’s parent company, says that he believes “technologies which enable more people to equally and democratically participate in global discussions will ultimately drive passenger demand.”
This focus extends to more traditional accessibility as well. Back on the ground, ANA was seeing a steadily rising number of passenger requests for wheelchairs at Tokyo’s Narita Airport. Working with Panasonic, ANA began testing a way to serve more passengers with a limited amount of airport staff: remotely controlled electric wheelchairs. Although the wheelchairs are referred to as “self-driving,” a person is actually required to remotely control one main wheelchair, which then leads several more wheelchairs in a line, like train cars that are not physically linked together. This means that only one customer service agent is needed to assist several passengers simultaneously, freeing up agents to handle other requests. Although still in the testing phase, ANA plans to introduce the service at Narita Airport sometime this year, and possibly expand to other airports in Japan.
While these tech gadgets aim to tackle the more common problems of air travel, the company’s most intriguing investment in futuristic tech doesn’t involve air travel at all. By this summer’s Olympics, ANA HD will deploy 1,000 robot avatars (designed in collaboration with OhmniLabs) called “Newmes” in high-demand areas in Tokyo, including shopping centers, tourist attractions and museums, and hospitals and elderly care facilities.
The short-term goal is to make avatars available to the Japanese public and for use internally by companies and governmental agencies (unfortunately, Newmes won’t be stationed inside Olympic facilities due to sponsorship rights). Users will be able to log in to the platform (to launch in April this year) on a personal computer, although a mobile version of the app will be ready by next year. Eventually, people around the world will have access to Newmes via a global portal currently in development.
After this first batch has been deployed, ANA HD will continue to install more avatars throughout Japan and around the world, including non-Newme robots currently in the works. The company is also sponsoring a global contest, the $10 million ANA Avatar XPRIZE, to encourage and accelerate the development of avatar systems.
But the company also wants to send people to outposts in the depths of the ocean—and even to the surface of the moon. ANA HD has already joined forces with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to create Avatar X, a program that is on a mission to develop robot avatars for space exploration and for the treatment of patients in low Earth orbit space stations by Earth-bound doctors.
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