Jan

Easy Yet Untapped Revenue Channel for Hotels Worldwide

There are many travelers looking for hotels and places to stay on social web. Every day.

Take Twitter, for example:

 

Or this:



People are genuinely looking for help. Surprisingly though only few are getting it. According to nmodes data less than 12% of Twitter travel  requests are being answered. The rest - lost opportunities for hotels and businesses in the hospitality industry.  

 And how big is this opportunity anyway?

nmodes Twitter data shows that every 15 min somebody expresses intent of going to, or visiting New York. Most of these travelers need a place to stay there.

Every 33 min - intent of traveling to London.

Every 54 min - intent of traveling to Paris.

We started Twitter recommendation service @nmodesHelps and were encouranged by the results. 72% of those that received our travel recommendations reacted by thanking us and expressing their gratitude. This reinforced our assumption that people seek travel advice on Twitter, accept it as an instant value, and are prepared to act upon it.

The hotels that are ready to move fast to monetize this opportunity will benefit the most.

 

Interested in reading more? Check out our other blogs:

Beware the lure of crowdsourced data

Crowdsourced data can often be inconsistent, messy or downright wrong 

We all like something for nothing, that’s why open source software is so popular. (It’s also why the Pirate  Bay exists). But sometimes things that seem too good to be true are just that. 

Repustate is in the text analytics game which means we needs lots and lots of data to model certain  characteristics of written text. We need common words, grammar constructs, human-annotated corpora  of text etc. to make our various language models work as quickly and as well as they do. 

We recently embarked on the next phase of our text analytics adventure: semantic analysis. Semantic  analysis the process of taking arbitrary text and assigning meaning to the individual, relevant components.  For example, being able to identify “apple” as a fruit in the sentence “I went apple picking yesterday” but to  identify “Apple’ the company when saying “I can’t wait for the new Apple product announcement” (note:  even though I used title case for the latter example, casing should not matter)

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AI unmasked: Have chatbots failed?

It is becoming increasingly popular to say that chatbots have failed and are overhyped.

While it is true that in many cases expectations from chatbots significantly exceed the results on the ground, the anticipation of chatbots’ demise are somewhat premature. 

One of the main problems for chatbots is that the market is inundated with low quality solution providers who deliver low quality results. This happened because conversational AI seems to have low entry barriers. Unlike other recent technological darlings such as space technology or renewable energy, conversational AI is purely software and therefore does not require vast sums of initial investment. 

What this approach is missing however,  is that conversational AI, in addition to being a software, also requires an accurate understanding of how language works. And there is a limited number of people in the world that do have such understanding.

When conversational AI is delivered by AI experts who understand the way human language works, the results are good and convincing, just as how you would expect them to be.

Suffering from unsatisfactory product quality is a common problem for many new and emerging industries.  The rules of the market dictate that most of the low quality players will eventually disappear. Poorly created chatbots will therefore not be around for too long.

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