Case Study: NAVITIME JAPAN halves development time and delivers a real-time multilingual travel chatbot with Microsoft Power BI

Navigation technology company creates chatbot to help tourists get around Japan

NAVITIME, a Tokyo-based navigation technology company, needed to make it easier for non-Japanese-speaking tourists to find restaurants, sights, and services across Japan. To add conversational, mixed-language search and image-recognition capabilities to its travel apps, NAVITIME turned to Microsoft technologies — including Microsoft Power BI alongside Microsoft Bot Framework, LUIS, Azure Search and Cognitive Services — to build a language-intelligent chatbot that answers travel questions in real time.

Using Microsoft Power BI to monitor search terms and analyze user data, and leveraging Microsoft Bot Framework with LUIS, Azure Search, Bing Image Search and Custom Vision for NLP and image recognition, NAVITIME connected the chatbot to its iOS apps via Direct Line API and Azure services. The bot was developed in one week and launched within a month (halving expected development time), has been rolled out across Kamakura, Tokyo, Kyoto, Hokkaido and Okinawa apps, generated positive user feedback, and enabled NAVITIME to expand features and scale toward a nationwide, one-stop travel assistant.

NAVITIME

Daisuke Kezuka

General Manager of Travel Business