Chat bot introduced in Tula region to inform tourists about recreational opportunities

2021: Informing the public about recreational opportunities

The Tula Region Committee for the Development of Tourism together with the national operator Rostelecom and the company OmniLine launched a project to inform the population about recreational opportunities within the region. The basis of the project was the introduction of a digital assistant (chatbot) on a single tourist portal visittula.com and in the mobile application Visit Tula.

In 2020, despite restrictions due to coronavirus, 1.134 million people visited the Tula region. According to researchers of the tvil.ru service, Tula entered the top 10 most popular tourist cities in Russia along with St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan and Nizhny Novgorod. Rest in the Russian regions is a trend of recent years. Local authorities see the desire of residents of Russia and foreign citizens to study new places and strive to be as open as possible to tourists.

Any tourist who is interested in relaxing in the Tula region can ask the necessary questions in the chat on the visittula.com portal or in the Visit Tula application.

When starting a chat booth, the user, along with a greeting, is given a menu with possible options, for example, "Attractions," "Cafes and restaurants," "Hotels," 'Contact a consultant. " Also, the subscriber can send his question. Moreover, in whatever form the appeal is written, the bot, working on the basis of artificial intelligence, recognizes the essence and gives a response to the subscriber. Query, dialog context for processing subsequent cases is saved.

If the user follows the suggested menu and selects ready-made articles, at each stage he has the opportunity to return to the main menu or contact a consultant.

The chat bot works in 24/7 mode, which allows tourists to quickly get the necessary information.

When creating a chatbot, technology was used on the AutoFAQ platform, which allows users to highlight the essence from unstructured questions on different topics, compare it with information from the database and issue a relevant answer. The bot works on the basis of artificial intelligence, which allows it to study, processing an increasing number of requests, and increase the number of correct answers to 90%.

The knowledge base, the information from which the bot uses, is a huge multimedia library, which contains not only text information, but also photos, videos, as well as links to useful resources.

The introduction of chat bots allowed:

• solve half of the requests without the participation of the operator;
• Minimize response waiting times for subscribers
• increase the loyalty of tourists.

The created chat bot differs in its knowledge base about all the sights of the Tula region, where information is used in the form of text, photos, videos, links. The project also carries high social significance, as it increases the loyalty of users and contributes to the development of domestic tourism.