AI IS ABOUT TO CHANGE YOUR CRUISE EXPERIENCE

The world’s first virtual personal cruise assistant has arrived. Just this March, MSC Cruises introduced its guests to ZOE with the launch of its new ship, the MSC Bellissima, and it will be available on each new ship in the company’s fleet from now on.

MSC Bellissima

Whenever a guest on the ship has a question, all they have to do is say, “OK ZOE”, and the ship’s voiceactivated assistant will be ready to answer hundreds of questions about the cruise, provide information about onboard services, give guidance and suggestions or even help to book a service.

ZOE is found in every cabin in the ship, and can speak seven languages. She has been programmed and trained to respond to more than 800 of the most commonly asked questions with thousands of different variants of each question. Testing was carried out on the conversation designs, ZOE’s natural speech recognition and ability to transform speech into text and back again, in addition to scores of other behavioural, experiential and performance tests. As an artificial intelligence solution, ZOE is designed to continue learning and developing her responses based on real guest interactions.

MSC Cruises assures guests that she is not designed to replace human interaction between crew and guests, but rather to provide guests with the flexibility to communicate and discover information from the comfort of their cabins.

Harman International and Samsung Electronics present ZOE.

Gianni Onorato, MSC Cruises’ CEO, comments, “There was a core guest need to be met, which was to find answers to common questions in a quick and easy way, enabling guests to make the most of their holiday. We researched the latest connected technologies and identified voice assistants and artificial intelligence as the way to meet this need, and the work on ZOE began.”

“Today, customers have increasingly high expectations for connected experiences wherever they live, work, and now, travel,” says Sanjay Dhawan, President, Connected Services and CTO, HARMAN – a subsidiary of Samsung Electronics that developed ZOE in partnership with MSC Cruises. “Digital assistants and voice-recognition technologies are transforming the opportunity to create a guest experience that is highly personal, adaptable and intuitive.”

Essentially, special microphones and a professional quality speaker in the cabin are activated by your voice, and ZOE also interacts with the in-cabin TV. It can also connect with the cruise app on your phone directly through Bluetooth so that you can enjoy music, podcasts and more directly in your cabin.