- ICT will implement a chatbot on the website visitcostarica.com to respond to user queries 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
- Mr. Sloth will be responsible for assisting tourists in a Spanish- and English-language chat, equipped with a constantly improving artificial intelligence.
Beginning this month, Mr. Sloth, a three-toed sloth, will be the face of a new chatbot serving domestic and international tourists. The interactive application is driven by artificial intelligence, and has been developed by the Costa Rican Tourism Board (ICT) to improve access to the information on the visitcostarica.com website, which is visited by over 1.2 million users every year.
Mr. Sloth has been programmed to use colloquial language and a friendly personality when interacting with users in English and Spanish. He provides information, general recommendations and notifications, using intelligent functions that allow him to find links between searches and results, which facilitates his learning and continuous improvement.
Currently, Mr. Sloth can respond to over 20,000 questions, with a key advantage being that this number will increase over time as the tool is used. The chatbot will also help delve into the concerns, questions and search preferences of tourists who are interested in visiting our country. For certain specific questions, the bot will be able to provide additional information. Furthermore, it processes a large number of requests quickly and navigates using multiple databases to offer results with no downtime.
“Service to tourists has to be efficient and high-quality, which is why the use of new technologies like this chatbot, which uses artificial intelligence, is an important step for our administration and the support we offer to domestic and international tourists, providing them with responses to their queries and 24/7 information needs as they plan their trip to Costa Rica”, said Víctor Ramírez, ICT’s Tourism Service Director.
A constantly evolving tool
According to ICT, Mr. Sloth’s objective is to improve access to tourist information about the destination, as well as providing assistance and safety information for tourists before they arrive in our country.
The application has to have logic mechanisms and clear instructions in order to work correctly, so that users can interact with it and resolve their inquiries. Once operational, developers will be continuously testing it and periodically evaluating it to improve the level of precision of the answers, ensuring that it functions according to its objectives and does so in an effective manner.
This chatbot, the first of its kind in Central America, is one of the technological tools that ICT is implementing to improve its assistance to tourists.
According to information recently released by ICT, some 1,335,687 visits were recorded by tourists entering the country by air, which represents growth of 4.5% compared to the same period in 2018. The average stay by international tourists in Costa Rica is 11 nights.
Features of Mr. Sloth / Señor Perezoso de Tres Dedos
- Name: Mr. Sloth or Señor Perezoso de Tres Dedos
- Personality: Friendly, attentive and always willing to help out
- Type of bot: WebChat with artificial intelligence.
- Response precision: 70% (initial percentage that will be increased based on the number of responses received).
Training level: Intermediate but with constant improvement.
