zIA: a GenAI-powered local auntie assists tourists in Italy
This work addresses the problem of enhancing tourist experiences through AI for tourism organizations, but it appears incremental as it applies existing generative AI methods to a specific domain without novel breakthroughs.
The authors tackled the need for personalized tourism assistance by developing a generative AI-based chatbot that adopts the persona of an Italian auntie to provide tailored recommendations and itineraries for tourists in Italy, though concrete performance numbers are not provided.
The Tourism and Destination Management Organization (DMO) industry is rapidly evolving to adapt to new technologies and traveler expectations. Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers an astonishing and innovative opportunity to enhance the tourism experience by providing personalized, interactive and engaging assistance. In this article, we propose a generative AI-based chatbot for tourism assistance. The chatbot leverages AI ability to generate realistic and creative texts, adopting the friendly persona of the well-known Italian all-knowledgeable aunties, to provide tourists with personalized information, tailored and dynamic pre, during and post recommendations and trip plans and personalized itineraries, using both text and voice commands, and supporting different languages to satisfy Italian and foreign tourists expectations. This work is under development in the Molise CTE research project, funded by the Italian Minister of the Economic Growth (MIMIT), with the aim to leverage the best emerging technologies available, such as Cloud and AI to produce state of the art solutions in the Smart City environment.