Sony AI launches the “Gastronomy Flagship Project″ consisting of Research and Development of AI Powered Recipe Creation App, Chef Assisting Cooking Robot and a Community Co-creation Initiative

Tokyo, Japan – Sony Corporation established Sony AI as an internal organization in November 2019 and it became a new company in April 2020 with a global presence in Japan, the United States, and Europe. Sony AI promotes fundamental research and development of artificial intelligence (AI) and aims to “create AI that unleashes human imagination and creativity.”

In addition to Sony’s existing business areas of “gaming” and “imaging & sensing,” Sony AI has set “gastronomy” as its flagship theme for new technical and business exploration. With the aim of enhancing the creativity and techniques of chefs around the world, the Gastronomy Flagship Project consists of the research and development of an AI application for new recipe creation, a robotics solution that can assist chefs in their cooking process, and a community co-creation initiative that will serve as a foundation to these activities.

In addition to games, Music, and Pictures, Sony AI sees great opportunities in Gastronomy as one of the global creative entertainment domains connecting chefs, who are creators, with their audiences. To this end, Sony AI will pursue its own research and development efforts in partnerships with various collaborators.

AI-Powered Recipe Creation App

Recipe creation is a very challenging research area for AI, as there are infinite possibilities for combinations of ingredients, as well as constraints such as location, climate, season, and a person’s health and food preferences, that must be taken into account.

Sony AI will utilize a variety of data sources – including recipes and ingredient data, such as taste, aroma, flavor, molecular structure, nutrients, etc. – to develop a Recipe Creation App that will be powered by proprietary AI algorithms to assist the world’s top-level chefs in their creative process of ingredient pairing, recipe design, and menu creation.

Through this App, Sony AI aims not only to assist in making delicious food but also to contribute to people’s health and the sustainability of the environment.

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Routier announces an integration partnership with Zonetail Inc. (TSXV:ZONE, OTCQB:ZTLFF) that can enable 25,000+ Zonetail partnered hotels across North America to facilitate contactless mobile communication between guests, staff, and local businesses. Routier is a leading provider of AI-enabled hotel guest-engagement and omni-channel messaging solutions that connect guests and staff via SMS/text messaging, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook, Line, etc., and provides a unified dashboard to hotel teams to communicate with guests on their preferred messaging channel of choice. Zonetail is a mobile platform that connects guests to hotel amenities and services, as well as local businesses, such as restaurants, shops, attractions and other specialty services. These businesses pay Zonetail a fee to communicate with the highly valued, yet difficult to reach hotel guests. The advertising and transactional revenue generated, allows Zonetail to offer it's platform at no cost to its hotel partners.

Together, the joint Routier + Zonetail solution is providing a compelling business model and digital safety net for recovering properties in the wake of COVID-19. Guests can now engage with both hotel staff and the local neighborhood via the Zonetail Hotel Platform or through Routier's unified communications platform, MessageHub, while hoteliers use Routier's unified dashboard to respond to guest queries coming from the app channel or other messaging platform. As a multilingual guest concierge, request and guest satisfaction management tool, and maintenance-tracking platform, MessageHub enables recovering properties to maintain high quality guest-centric experiences that fully comply with social distancing concerns, regardless of reduced labor resources. Routier's AI Bot answers guests' requests or directs them to the relevant department to have a staff member resolve an issue in person. Property teams can utilize Routier's workflow to manage and track all guest and staff processes and communicate in 65 languages automatically.