Data-Moove’s Jérôme Berlioz tells us about MinoTour’s aspirations for Data Pitch and beyond.
Q: Describe your Data Pitch challenge idea
MinoTour is a traveler concierge for smart tourism data. Imagine being on holiday with a bit of spare time and wondering what to do during the day. Imagine getting personalised recommendations of sights to see, activities to do and events not to miss, all without having to check dozens of specialised apps that lack the comprehensive local content that will satisfy your needs. MinoTour will be a conversational agent dedicated to local authorities and visiting tourists. It will understand natural questions, but also use machine learning to incorporate tourist recommendations, and provide a flexible array of answers.
Q: What does the idea set out to achieve?
Tourism data is complex because it is scattered throughout multiple sources, describing sights, activities, events, accommodation and restaurants in a variety of formats. Consequently, it is very hard to know what current activities on offer would be worth trying. MinoTour’s solution will make the tourism offer of an area available from local authorities to all visitors through an app or integrated in the local authority’s online services.
Q: What makes your idea different or unique?
Over the last 3 years, we have developed the CityMoove platform that automatically builds knowledge graphs in the broad domain of tourism. In essence, the platform collates tourism offers coming from official tourism offices and online media. With the help of our Research and Development partner EURECOM as a technical advisor, a world-renowned research centre in digital sciences, Data Moove will develop a chatbot, available on all major messaging applications, that would use the knowledge graphs to answer all tourists’ questions.
Q: Where did the idea come from?
Initially, the idea came about directly from Data-Moove’s customers. There was increasing demand for this kind of solution in order to promote their tourist offers in real time and to reduce crowding in public offices during the summer season. It was also a logical step forward. Recent progress in natural language understanding has opened the door to more accurate virtual assistants. After having developed a powerful platform to manage tourism Big Data, we needed a supporting tool to efficiently diffuse the information with users.
Q: What excites you about the challenge you applied for?
Data Pitch will allow us to test breakthrough semantic technologies fed by large tourist knowledges graphs. Our goal will be to provide an intelligent assistant able to help visitors find their way by using personalised tourist recommendations in accordance with their needs. It will be a Turing test dedicated to the tourist market sector. This challenge is really exciting; we feel like technological explorers!
Q: How did your team meet?
Data-Moove is a startup created in March 2016 in the European technology park Sophia Antipolis, sharing and organising mass data through new technologies. Data-Moove’s motto is: “the right information to the right person at the right time in the right place”. The concept was born from the needs of customers identified by leaders of Data Moove while working on other professional multimedia projects in the tourism field, but also as a partner to EURECOM on the Data Moove product which offers technology solutions in the management of mass tourism data.
Q: What’s the best thing about working with data?
These days, there is a lot of varied tourism data. The tourist faces to the Big data exactly like the industry. The best thing about working with data is transforming a chaotic data environment into a cleaned, clear and understandable level of information thanks to algorithms, Machine learning and AI. We are really passionate about the subject, especially as it is perpetually evolving!
Q: Is there anything else you want to tell us about your startup and why you do what you do?
We are very happy to have been chosen to participate in this adventure. We are convinced that the Data Pitch network will help us to evolve MinoTour while working closely with other startups, and also getting help from major data players with invaluable know-how and knowledge in their respective fields. We will be able to accelerate our development and this challenge will give us important access to the market for the sale of MinoTour. We hope to bring about an efficient flow of tourist information in line with the global smart city trend.