Interactive Kiosks: The Service Delivery Platform of the Future
Eight seconds.1 That’s the average amount of time a business has to grab a customer’s attention and keep it. So what’s your plan to not only capture the attention of your increasingly tech-savvy customers but also keep them engaged? The next generation of interactive digital kiosks is a great place to start.
They are sophisticated, connected, and intelligent platforms that provide customers with immersive, playful, and memorable experiences that delight while helping you extend your operations and accelerate your growth.
From ordering a favorite meal without ever touching a screen to virtually trying on clothes while in a retail store to conducting banking business with a virtual AI-powered assistant—the possibilities for touchless, convenient, personalized, engaging experiences are nearly endless when leveraging the service delivery platform of the future.
Intel, together with our ecosystem partners, is helping lead businesses like yours through the adoption and deployment of, or update and upgrade to, these new kiosks. With innovative kiosk solutions powered by Intel® technology, you can get ahead and stay ahead of your competition while meeting new and changing customer demands.
Benefits of Interactive Kiosks
Interactive kiosks can help cities, government agencies, and businesses in a range of industries differentiate themselves in their growing and hypercompetitive industries. By upgrading to interactive digital kiosks, businesses and organizations can:
- Create fun, exciting, safe experiences: With touchless technologies, augmented reality (AR), secure mobile control, and other integrated innovations, customers can interact with kiosks in new and compelling ways, like chatting with an AI-powered service avatar or navigating a wayfinding kiosk by gesture or personal mobile device.
- Provide frictionless, contactless, and engaging interactions: With intelligent pickup lockers and kiosks, businesses can provide fast, simple, hyperconvenient shopping with 24/7 order fulfillment.
- Offer personalized, data-driven recommendations: When integrated with the latest analytics solutions, self-service kiosks can automatically suggest add-on purchases that are personalized to customers based on their past behavior or preferences.
- Maximize employee time with customers: Interactive kiosks can help automate processes, allowing employees to focus on core, value-added business tasks like one-on-one customer service.
Transform Customer Engagement with Touchless Interactive Kiosk Experiences
Businesses can take customer engagement to the next level by incorporating computer vision, AI, and analytics technologies into kiosks to enable exciting touchless interactions. Touchless technology enhances the customer experience by reducing friction throughout the purchasing journey and supporting self-service features for speed and convenience. Rather than requiring physical touch on kiosk screens, transactions and communications can be conducted through interactions such as:
- Gesture recognition: When integrated with computer vision, radar, and AI technologies, kiosks can detect common hand gestures like a directional palm swipe to review menu options or a customer giving a thumbs-up to confirm a transaction when checking into a hotel or banking.
- Vision-based object or opt-in facial detection: By incorporating computer vision and eye-tracking software, kiosks can be used to accelerate checkout in stores by recognizing multiple items in a cart at one time—rather than requiring individual scanning—or be used to allow employees to access a secured workplace.
- Speech dictation or conversational AI: When equipped with audio and speech technology, kiosks can use conversational AI—which includes elements of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Text-to-Speech (TTS)—to detect, understand, and respond to vocal sounds, such as questions a customer may ask about a certain product. This frees up employees to focus on value-added tasks.
Innovative Uses for Interactive Kiosks
Businesses, healthcare institutions, and governments use kiosks in a variety of ways. Interactive digital kiosks are often deployed to connect with customers and citizens in a new way, automate repetitive tasks, and enable self-service options for users.
Retail
Today’s customers want seamless shopping experiences that merge online shopping with a business’s in-store environment. With automated kiosks and smart vending machines, businesses can provide frictionless experiences for customers, no matter when and where they shop. Kiosks built on Intel® technologies can help boost bottom-line results for business owners by driving down labor costs and allowing employees to focus on serving customers. They can also help improve sales by providing a new platform to upsell, cross-sell, and provide personalized offers to shoppers. When kiosks are integrated with innovative solutions, such as the DaveAI virtual AI service avatar and AI chatbot solution, they can offer customers real-time, voice-based interactions with a conversationally intelligent AI sales avatar. The DaveAI solution can be incorporated across channels, including digital kiosks, virtual reality (VR) devices, mobile apps, and online properties to offer customers 24-hour seamless access to a virtual sales associate.
Restaurants and Hospitality
Restaurants and hotels are constantly innovating and finding new ways to offer greater convenience and differentiated experiences to customers and guests. Incorporating an audio-based touchless drive-thru kiosk is one way Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken restaurants are delighting customers while increasing the speed of service, shortening wait times, and improving order accuracy. The kiosk uses a conversational AI solution created by Hi Auto and powered with Intel® technology to greet guests, take orders, answer questions, and, when appropriate, upsell before confirming and completing the order.
Healthcare
To make the patient experience more informative and less stressful, hospitals and healthcare facilities are implementing self-service kiosks. Patients can check in upon arrival and receive personalized directions, information about healthcare services and providers, and reminders to pay outstanding balances. Kiosks can also be used for automated contactless services, such as blood glucose checks, medicine dispensing, or measurement of basic vitals.
Banking
Touchless self-service kiosks can help banks enrich customer experiences by providing access to virtual tellers and chatbots that can help them quickly solve their problems. A leading bank in India is using an AI Virtual Assistant kiosk solution powered by Intel and Intel partner technologies to assist customers with in-branch services. The AI Virtual Assistant goes beyond the capabilities of common text-based conversational chatbots by using NLP and advanced deep learning technology to converse with customers about complex and varied topics such as financial advice, loan qualification, or personalized information about their account or credit cards.
Smart Cities/Governments
Interactive kiosks help create safe, informed, and connected cities. They can help citizens and visitors navigate a city or building though wayfinding features, provide important public safety alerts, or offer value-added services like free Wi-Fi connectivity. One topic that is always top of mind for cities and governments is the health and safety of their constituents. One way to alleviate health concerns is to remove touch from public kiosk interactions. With technology offered by Outdu, touch-based kiosks and interactive displays can be transformed into touchless solutions with minimal effort, low investment, and no change to existing applications. Outdu’s near-real-time video and audio analytics solution built on Intel® technology can be used to retrofit existing kiosks into touchless systems that recognize gesture- or voice-based inputs.
Intel® Technologies for Interactive Kiosks
Intel® technologies for computer vision, touchless gesture controls, speech and conversational AI, and edge computing are key to enabling innovative and transformative kiosk use cases.
| Intel® Technologies Enable the Next Generation of Kiosks | |
|---|---|
| Hardware | |
| Intel® IoT and embedded processors | Intel® processors support dynamic, 8K visual experiences and responsive touchscreens. For powerful video analytics and AI-enabled capabilities like customer analytics, these processors can be paired with an Intel® Movidius™ VPU or FPGA. |
| Intel® NUC board | The Intel® NUC board is the building block for interactive kiosks that offer engaging on-screen customer experiences, like the self-service kiosks used by quick-service restaurants. |
| Software | |
| Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ toolkit | The Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ toolkit allows businesses to deploy AI-driven kiosk use cases faster and more efficiently. It enables developers to seamlessly deploy and optimize workloads, such as object and natural language detection, for responsive advertising and infotainment and to extend sales and services autonomously. |
| Intel® Conversational AI Chat Bot Reference Implementation | The Intel® Conversational AI Chat Bot Reference Implementation fast-tracks development for kiosks by providing developers with all the preconfigured software necessary to build and test a complete conversational AI chatbot application. |
| Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ Speech Library and Speech Recognition Demos | The Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ Speech Library and Speech Recognition Demos package provides developers with demonstrations of acoustic model inference based on Kaldi neural networks. |
| Intel® Kiosk Peripheral Management Utility (Intel® KPM Utility) | The Intel® KPM Utility enables a smart and efficient way to deploy and maintain Intel-based self-service kiosks that are frequently used by hotels, banks, grocery stores, and governments to streamline the customer experience. |
| Reference Designs and Form Factor Specifications | |
| Intel® Smart Display Module (Intel® SDM) | The Intel® SDM specification and reference design helps businesses meet the demand for thin, power-efficient displays in interactive kiosks. |
| Intel® Smart Kiosk Module (Intel® SKM) | Intel® SKM makes it easier for businesses and governments to scale and maintain interactive informational kiosks. It features a modular design, so servicing, replacing, or upgrading the compute module can be done more easily and without the need to unplug and reattach multiple cables. |
| Security and Management | |
| Intel® technologies for security | Intel® technologies for security help businesses protect kiosk infrastructure from a widening variety of attacks. They are simple to implement, seamless to deploy, and easy to manage and use. This includes Intel® Trusted Execution Technology, which hardens platforms from hardware-level attacks and other emerging threats such as hypervisor attacks. |
| Intel vPro® platform | The Intel vPro® platform provides complete remote management for kiosks, so IT can address issues before they become bigger problems—even if the kiosks or smart vending machines are powered off. This ability transforms IT efficiency and helps reduce costs. |
| Intel® Active Management Technology (Intel® AMT) | Intel® AMT helps reduce maintenance and administrative costs related to remote manageability of kiosk solutions by providing persistent out-of-band connectivity that operates independently of the OS, allowing fixes to a wider range of systems issues, even if the OS is down. With the Open AMT Cloud Toolkit businesses can integrate cloud-based, out-of-band manageability into new and existing management consoles and software solutions. |
| Connectivity | |
| Intel® Wi-Fi and 5G | Intel® technology-based kiosks support connectivity to Wi-Fi or 5G. This enables governments and cities to offer high-value services from their kiosks such as free Wi-Fi, VoIP calling, wayfinding, public notifications, and security alerts. |
Transform Business and Elevate Customer Experiences with Interactive Kiosk Technologies
From retail stores to hospitals, transportation hubs, government offices, and entertainment venues, Intel, together with our partners, is helping transform customer and citizen experiences by enabling the next generation of interactive, multimodal kiosks.
Businesses can leverage our deep expertise, broad technology portfolio, and global network of partners to access the latest kiosk innovations and solutions that are market ready, prevalidated, and primed to deliver transformative use cases.
Discover prebuilt, precertified partner solutions to begin realizing the benefits of interactive kiosks today.