Data-Moove company, selected among 140 startups in the Tourism and Smart Assistant challenge by Data Pitch, is now introducing the first version of Minotour.

Minotour is an intelligent assistant or “Chatbot” dedicated to local authorities and tourists (end-users). Based on the City Moove platform, Minotour will answer, using natural language, to all tourist questions asked by visitors. The first version will be based on the knowledge base of the Côte d’Azur (French Riviera).

“Minotour is much more than a chatbot, it is an intelligent Personal Tourist Assistant.”

Our aim is to take travel experience to the next level by making the search of tourist attractions fast and entertaining in a simple popular messaging system, instead of looking for places from just a single database. Our ML algorithm suggests all tourist offers based on a semantic platform called City Moove which collects numerous specialized tourist information sources: public & private feeds, social media, and tourism software.

Using advanced NLP algorithms, the user can chat with Minotour as they would do with a tourist guide.

But we do not want to stop there: contextual information and services are also paramount. Exactly as a tourist guide would do and other chatbots do not, Minotour will deliver results according to contextual information such as weather, transportation, booking, ticketing and parking in the future release.

The back bone used to build this real intelligent Digital Tourist Assistant are:

• City Moove: Big Data platform (Data is the new black gold) that can collect and manage dozen of sources (local authorities, private feeds such as Viator, social media) into knowledge bases
• NLU agnostic: possibility of combining Google DialogFlow, Facebook Wit.AI, Microsoft LUIS, IBM Watson, SNIPS, etc.
• FADE for Automatic NLU training: tool that analyzes the Knowledge Graph and automatically train NLU engines with user sentences
• Minotour middleware: based on Botkit, that manages connections to numerous channels (messaging app, Amazon Alexa, Google Home) and contextual information (weather, booking, ticketing, and transportation)

We would like to thank Data Pitch as they were the acceleration need for the research and development of our product Minotour. Their support with close follow-up to reply to our needs, constraints and issues, provide feedbacks on strategies to orientate / correct our activity in every sides and bridge to create business and find partnership opportunities and strong orientation toward a fast go-to-market helped us the archive this.

After 3 successful milestones with a team of 6 members and optimized city move platform we now have Minotour first beta release (v3). We have signed experimentation agreement and other business letter of business interest including 3 new customers for Minotour in the pipeline. Expecting to set our big foot forward in the world of tourism with Minotour to be the first real intelligent Digital Tourist Assistant.

Our next lead is to enhance City Moove with even more data sets and tourist knowledge graphs. To develop the Ad Network inside Minotour and to adapt Minotour and City Moove to other potential transversal domains (e.g. smart cities: home automation and concierge)