Skip to main content

Hologram replaces human receptionist at council office in London

hologram replaces human receptionist at council office in london shanice
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Visit the council offices in Brent, north-west London, and you’ll be greeted by a virtual assistant in the form of a hologram.

Going by the name of Shanice, the new receptionist, which has cost the council an estimated £12,000 ($18,500), will offer visitors a friendly smile and (hopefully) answer questions, albeit simple ones pre-programmed into a tablet.

Tap the appropriate request on the display and Shanice, who’s projected onto a thin screen positioned behind the reception desk, will give you directions to the relevant service within the building. However, if you have a question that doesn’t appear on the display, presumably you’ll have to go off in search of a real live person to help get you sorted.

Savings?

According to Brent councillor James Denselow, Shanice will save the council around £17,000 ($26,500) a year.

“The best thing is it’s going to save us lots of money, without compromising our service,” Denselow told the Evening Standard. “Nowadays we’re constantly having to look at innovative ways to cut costs and they don’t come more cutting edge than Shanice.”

However, opposition councillor Alison Hopkins isn’t entirely happy with the move, calling it a “startlingly expensive” way of dealing with complaints about poor signage around the new £90 million ($141m) civic center, which opened in June.

“As the council admits, Shanice can’t respond even to basic questions but is limited to a small number of pre-recorded scripts,” Hopkins said. “I hope she has been told one of the commonest questions is: ‘Where are the toilets?’”

Critics suggest any savings will probably be spent on maintaining Shanice, with the hologram likely to require reprogramming once its operators learn more about the kinds of questions visitors are asking. And what about the poor worker replaced by Shanice? It can’t be much fun telling family and friends you’ve been replaced by a hologram.

Judging by the demonstration video below, Shanice’s explanations appear, for the most part, clear and concise. Her information regarding the seemingly unusual elevator procedure – where you have to keep your finger on the button the whole time – is certainly without ambiguity.

“To use the lift, please call it by holding the button, and keeping it held until the lift arrives,” Shanice helpfully explains. “Once in the lift, keep the button held until you reach the mezzanine level.”

While such virtual assistants have been seen at some airports reminding passengers of what they can and can’t take on as hand luggage, this is believed to be the first time a hologram has been used by a local council in the UK. And it shouldn’t be too long before we find out if it’s also the last.

[Image: Brent Council]

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more