Hosting an array of concerts, Kaohsiung is enjoying a tourism boom in recent years.
The Kaohsiung City Government assigned the problem for the smart city division of the AI Wave: Taiwan Generative AI Applications Hackathon, asking the participating teams to leverage generative AI to create innovative tourism applications that enhance tourist experience of Kaohsiung's concert economy. The teams named "AI Shines" and "Urban Smart Team (It's Takao)" won the gold and silver awards for the generative AI creativity and usability their works demonstrate.
AI Shines creates customized itineraries
Zhi-Jia Wang, Sheng-Ya Weng, Song-Kai Hong and Ting-Jia Guo from Department of Statistics, Ministry of the Interior formed AI Shines. They came up with the idea of the "Kaohsiung smart traveling and shopping" platform, which was built with AWS PartyRock, a service that allows users to create generative AI applications without coding, to provide customized itineraries to tourists.
The platform features customization, innovative ways to shop, massive data integration and AI-enabled personalized itinerary planning. Backed by big data from the Kaohsiung City Government, the solution interacts with tourists through a natural language user interface to learn their preferences and thereby plans itineraries for them based on six data categories.
It provides tourists with an all-in-one itinerary that includes shopping, dining, sightseeing, and souvenir buying, and dynamically adjusts the itinerary based on real-time feedback and user preference. It further uses AI to create personalized travel maps and plans for tourists to easily reference and follow.
Amid the post-pandemic tourism boom, people have an increasing demand for customized and interactive tours. AI Shines' solution will attract more tourists, extend their stay and boost repeated visits. On top of partnerships with local businesses, it can create value and spur growth for the tourism sector. On the foundation of AI Shines' solution, the Kaohsiung City Government can develop a diversity of tourism themes to help drive local business growth.
The teams named "AI Shines" won the gold award for the generative AI creativity and usability their works demonstrate
Urban Smart Team (It's Takao) boosts the financial benefits of concert events
Jen-Yu Chen, a journalism major at Shih Hsin University, Pin-Xuan Yu, an electronic engineering major at Chung Yuan Christian University, as well as Chia-Chin Huang and Yong-Han Chang from Chao Info Media (潮資訊媒體) formed Urban Smart Team (It's Takao). The team observed that Kaohsiung hosts 50+ concerts every year, drawing tens of thousands of music fans to the city.
Unfortunately, most young concertgoers leave the city right after the concerts so these events have not effectively benefited local businesses. In view of this, they came up with the idea of the "Urban Smart Team (It's Takao)" platform, built with the Anthropic Claude 3 on Amazon Web Services (AWS)' Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service offering a choice of high-performing foundation models from leading AI companies.
They use AI to generate stories in two languages and combine the stories with mixed reality treasure hunt games and personalized smart assistant to spur young tourists' interest in exploring Kaohsiung. The platform connects the city's major attractions and offers coupons from local specialty stores to participants who pass scavenger hunt challenges. The games are designed to encourage interaction and spice up users' experience of Kaohsiung.
As people attach greater importance to personalized tourism experience, the solution developed by Urban Smart Team (It's Takao) caters exactly to young tourists. The interactive tours and promotional favors make tourists spend more time and money in the city. The team estimates their solution will increase business growth in the surrounding areas from 30% to 60% and foreign tourists' interest in visiting Kaohsiung from 20% to 40%. The solution has great development potential and future collaborations with local businesses can create more revenue streams.
The teams named "Urban Smart Team (It's Takao)" won the silver award for the generative AI creativity and usability their works demonstrate
