“2 return tickets to Basel” – Humans and computers at the railway station counter
How will people buy a train ticket in the future? At the service counter or with a chatbot? Try it out and learn how your communication will be affected in the course of the interaction.
Buying a train ticket is an experience of everyday life. However, at our experimental booth, you can gather first-hand understanding of the complexity of this interaction through the latest technology from interactive linguistics. You will learn that many aspects of human interactions are more synthetic than we think — and that human-computer interactions could become more natural than we ever thought.
Have you noticed how important our eyes, hands and body are for communication? And how even the architecture of the service counter plays a role when you buy a ticket? We invite you to observe yourself by buying a train ticket at our booth. Language and video analysis will show you how you use not only your voice, but also how your head, hands and even your feet play a role in getting the right ticket from a service agent. Further, you will learn why ticket halls look similar all over the world, but also why the architecture of ticket counters has changed so much over the past years and will change even more in the future.
At our second station, we take you on a journey into the not-so-far future. Here, your sense of what’s real will be put to the test: Your task is to find out whether a real person or a fully automated algorithm is hiding behind the virtual agent that is selling you a ticket. We look forward to seeing you at our booth!
