Case Study: NAVITIME halves development time to launch multilingual travel chatbot with Microsoft Azure

Navigation technology company creates chatbot to help tourists get around Japan

NAVITIME JAPAN, a Tokyo-based navigation technology company, wanted to help English-speaking tourists navigate Japan despite language barriers and unfamiliar character sets. The company needed a way to provide searchable travel content, real-time answers, image-based place identification, and mixed-language queries in an app originally built for Japanese users.

NAVITIME built a multilingual chatbot using Microsoft Bot Framework with LUIS for natural-language understanding, integrating Bing Spell Check, Azure Search, Bing Image Search/Custom Vision, Direct Line API, Azure Functions and Cosmos DB. The approach halved development time—one week to develop and another month to launch—enabled a February 2017 rollout in Kamakura and expansion to Tokyo, Kyoto, Hokkaido and Okinawa, generated positive user feedback, and set the company on a path toward a single nationwide, one-stop travel assistant.

NAVITIME

Daisuke Kezuka

General Manager of Travel Business