Japan’s Henn na Hotel chain made history for being staffed almost entirely by robots. Just a few months ago we shared news of their robot dinosaurs in tiny bellboy hats working the check-in counters.
Henn na’s whole premise was that the efficiency of their multilingual, multiskilled robots could rival the efficiency of human staff.
Things were going well for a while, but now there are fresh allegations that some of these robots haven’t been doing their jobs as well as they should.
You see one of the in-room assistance robots thought a man’s loud snoring was a request. AWKWARD.
The robot woke the man up saying “sorry, I couldn’t catch that. Could you repeat your request?”.
Other guests claimed their iphone was way smarter than the concierge robots and there were problems faced during robotic check in too.
The hotel found that the robots often annoyed the guests and sometimes broke down.
The result? About half of Henn na’s 243 robot workforce have been fired. OUCH.
Just three years after the hotel launched their seemingly genius idea, Henn na has realised that robots are not entirely fit to replace humans just yet!