Nobi - smart virtual aircargo assistant

Virtual smart cargo assistant, managing your bookings, freights, and powered with AI\ML to alert about cargo problems. Addressed to forwarders and airlines, to better service their customers 24/7.

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Inspiration

Current helpdesk

Aircargo industry spends much money providing assistance to customers about their cargo, either about bookings, tracking, freight costs and\or updated info when having congestion (pandemics, or other issues that impact cargo transportation) on shipments.

Majority of Airlines hire people to provide remote virtual assistance to the customers. There are many job posts online recruiting for this position.

Some airlines during pandemics activated bots on their webpages to give assistance for travelling to the passengers about new rules related with covid. However, there is missing something similar for air cargo.

On the maritime side, Maersk developed a virtual assistance called Captain Peter to give visibility to reefer containers transportation (for now not for all containers, and as a paid\extra service).

Aircargo freight industry needs better virtual assistance, 24x7, automated, that could work, either for the airlines and the forwarders, to give better service to shippers and consignees. Welcome Nobi, your non-binary smart virtual cargo assistant, suitable for Airlines and Forwarders customers.

On top of that, to have a smart virtual cargo Assistant, we can use AI\ML to better understand the customer profile and give info and related news about shipments and usual locations that may affected current or upcoming shipments.

Nobi

What it does

Nobi implements a chat\voice non-binary smart virtual cargo assistant.

Use cases:

  1. Identify customer
  2. Booking Status and Tracking info
  3. Create Booking
  4. Freight price info
  5. Aircargo news
  6. Shipment Alerts

Integrations

  1. Onerecord IATA integration
  2. Speech to text and text to speech libraries integrations, allowing conversation
  3. Integrated with other virtual assistances, such as Alexa\Amazon, Siri\Apple, Assistant\Google, Cortana\Microsoft.
  4. Integrated with CHAMP Premium cargo tracking

How we built it

Architecture

To build NOBI portal and backend we used:

Angular – v13 for the front-end (https://angular.io/guide/update-to-latest-version)

Microsoft Bot Framework SDK (https://dev.botframework.com/) to implement the Bot Framework Emulator (https://github.com/microsoft/BotFramework-Emulator)

Speak-tts to implement text to speech from the chatbot (https://www.npmjs.com/package/speak-tts)

The ONE Record Server representing forwarder and airline was build using the following technologies:

Challenges we ran into

  • Use Microsoft Bot Framework SDK and implement it with our own socket (instead of emulator provided)

  • Connect and use onerecord API environment

  • Experiment the text to speech synthesis library (speech-tts)

  • Integrate all components – OneRecord API, Microsoft Bot Framework

  • Create a web adapter for Microsoft Bot Framework

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Using IATA onerecord standards

  • Using Microsoft Bot Framework

  • Connecting all the 3 components (Microsoft Bot Framework, ONERecord API, Our API)

What we learned

Haven’t found a middleware to connect to several known virtual assistants (alexa, siri, google assistant, cortana)

Learned how to use devpost

Knowing onerecord ontology (https://onerecord.iata.org/cargo)

What's next

For Nobi - virtual aircargo assistant – Develop all use cases

Create a API middleware to connect to main virtual assistants (no solution found)

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