China's first AI voice control hotel opens in Hangzhou

China's first artificial intelligence voice control hotel opened in Hangzhou on Thursday, August 17, reports huanqiu.com.

Alibaba Group's travel brand Fliggy [Photo: IC]

It's been developed by Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group's travel brand Fliggy.

Guests at the High Xuan Spa Hotel can control lighting, curtains, televisions, and also request information such as meal times, call room service or hail a taxi, simply by speaking into an intelligent speaker in the room.

The system will soon be spread to several other high-end hotels in the Westbrook Resort area of Hangzhou, in the Xixi National Wetland Park. After that, it'll be rolled-out nationwide.

The first customer of the High Xuan Spa Hotel in Hangzhou was a Japanese man who has been living in China for a many years. Traveling to Hangzhou, he stumbled across the hotel and was amazed by the level of technology he found in China.

An artificial intelligence system in a hotel room [Photo: huanqiu.com]

The "Future Hotel 2.0" plan will enable services such as virtual reality room booking and face recognition check-in, say Fliggy and Alibaba AI labs, adding that such hotel rooms will become a "trump card" for raising the standard of hotel management and customer experience.

They anticipate further investment in AI hotels, involving robots and virtual reality in the future.

Meanwhile, shares of China's e-commerce giant Alibaba went up 2.77 percent to close at 163.92 US dollars on Thursday, after the company announced better-than-expected quarterly earnings.