Simple AI travel guide with sophisticated technology
Behind Walkfo’s simple front-end, sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms create the best travel content for tourists. This ranges from fact refinement to natural voice audio generation. With the AI travel guide building its understanding of content enjoyed by tourists from the billions of new facts available each day, Walkfo delivers a unique travel experience that getter better and better.
Seeding AI learning for travel content
E-creation started the AI learning from a set of 5,000 random travel facts harvested public-domain content, which were individually rated by the content team. This initial seeding of the AI logic was applied to a further dataset of 50,000 facts, which were then ‘ration checked’ after the first pass by the AI, to help further refine & build the intelligence of the artificial intelligence.
This groundwork enables the Walkfo travel guide AI to ‘understand’ what is good content for travel on holiday, staycation or local travel. The AI continues to learn from fresh travel & tourism information whilst refining existing millions of facts – excluding poor quality content & rewriting longer content to make it more succinct.
To help the AI intelligence to achieve better filtering & refinement without going into an ‘echo chamber’, the logic is reinforced through public feedback via the ‘like’ & ‘dislike’ functionality built into Walkfo. This input from users outside of the Walkfo team to indicate when content incites a particularly polarising reaction helps the AI to use ‘crowd wisdom’ on a continual basis for improved performance.
AI creates natural sounding voice
Walkfo also uses AI to generate the most realistic & natural sounding voice files with ‘deep fake’ technology to mimimic the subtle nuances of intonation and tonal range. This technology has been typically only available to ‘big tech’ companies such as Google (as seen in Google Home devices). Walkfo created high-efficiency, bespoke code (hooked into the open-source NeMo AI TTS collection from Nvidia) to run across a distributed computing network to allow the creation of millions of audio files in a rapid timescale.
Walkfo uses fallback technology so where audio files have not yet been created, text-to-speech technology embedded into mobile devices is used to provide audio.
AI travel guide & heritage plaques worldwide
Another example where Walkfo is uses intelligent AI technology to improve traditional travel guides is in AI logic that connects 50,000+ heritage plaques across the world (such as London’s Blue Plaques) with content not available on the plaque itself. This AI implementation enables Walkfo to significantly improve the functional value of physical plaques, providing a far more detailed audio story than what can be written on a plaque itself.
Why use AI to build bespoke travel guides?
“We have been able to use artificial intelligence to both significantly improve the quality of history, travel and tourism content by filtering out ‘bad’ content & refining it into easy-to-digest audio from the huge pool of data available on the Internet and to build intelligent, meaningful links to existing physical technologies like heritage plaques & digital technologies like geocaches. This represents a unique advance in how people interact with the world whilst travelling, being especially relevant whilst travel has been impact by Covid – with AI technology enabling safer & more engaged travel” says Jan-Erik Paul, MD at E-creation and co-found of Walkfo.