We will suggest your favorite Hawaii travel plans in an instant

～Virtual assistant “Macana-Chan” Part 6～

November 20, 2019
Japan Airlines Co., Ltd.
IBM Japan, Ltd.
Altitude Incubation Inc.
Wovn Technologies, Inc.

Altitude Incubation Inc. (headquartered in Chuo-ku, Tokyo; Yukio Kitano, President & CEO; hereinafter referred to as “Altitude Incubation”) in cooperation with IBM Japan, Ltd. (headquartered in Chuo-ku, Tokyo; Akio Yamaguchi, President & CEO; hereinafter referred to as “IBM Japan”), Wovn Technologies, Inc. (headquartered in Minato-ku, Tokyo; Takaharu Hayashi, President and CEO; hereinafter referred to as “Wovn”), will launch a new service for “Makana-chan” (*1), a virtual assistant provided by Japan Airlines Corporation (headquartered in Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo; Yuji Akasaka, President and CEO; hereinafter referred to as “JAL”), that responds to information about Hawaii through natural conversation in chat form.

(1) How to access　http://www.jal.co.jp/inter/makana/index.html
(2) Established in 2012. Acquired more than 25 patents, and in 2016 received the Brand USA Marketing Innovation Award at a travel digital conference sponsored by Focus Light, a leading global travel research company.
(*3) A service that enables rapid localization by retrofitting it to existing systems, websites and applications. The service offers a combination of AI-equipped machine translation, bilingual glossary and professional translation.

By telling “Makana-chan” your itinerary for a trip to Hawaii, the number of people and what kind of sights you like to see, etc., the system will automatically and instantaneously generate and propose the optimal itinerary based on your plans and preferences. This was made possible through Altitude Incubation’s support of the development of the system in Japan, by introducing the proprietary automatic itinerary generation technology developed by the Silicon Valley start-up company inspirock(2). In addition, Wovn’s high-precision localization function, “WOVN.io(3),” has made it possible to provide “inspirock” technology in natural Japanese, which had not been previously deployed in Japanese. Also, IBM Japan expanded the chat function of Watson and built a system to use the itinerary creation function (JALTrip Planner) from Makana-chan.

Image of using the automatic trip plan creation function

JAL can now further develop and apply its AI chatbot through collaboration with a start-up company that possesses cutting-edge technology. JAL will continue to actively push the limits of creation of new value in order to improve customer satisfaction during travel.

JAL Trip Planner URL：https://www.jal-tripplanner.com/