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Costa to employ humanoid robots on board ships
The world’s first humanoid robot will join Costa Cruises staff from spring 2016.
The multi-lingual robots, which are capable of reading human emotions, will work on board the Costa Diadema and sister ship AIDAprima.
The cruise line has signed an exclusive €1 million agreement with French company Aldebaran, a subsidiary of the SoftBank Group, for the world’s first deployment of ‘Pepper’ robots on board cruise ships.
Pepper robots are designed to interact with people by communicating through intuitive interfaces including voice and touch.
The 120 cm robots are fitted with 3D cameras which allow them to detect people and their movements and analyse expressions and voice tones using the latest advances in voice and emotion recognition.
They speak fluent German, Italian and English and, according to Costa, will even be able to provide recommendations on restaurants, events and excursions.
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Bev
Editor in chief Bev Fearis has been a travel journalist for 25 years. She started her career at Travel Weekly, where she became deputy news editor, before joining Business Traveller as deputy editor and launching the magazine’s website. She has also written travel features, news and expert comment for the Guardian, Observer, Times, Telegraph, Boundless and other consumer titles and was named one of the top 50 UK travel journalists by the Press Gazette.
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