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1. Introduction
Since the term “robot” was introduced in 1920 (Zunt, 2002), robots or robotics has been a key topic in modernized industrial society and relevant research fields. Recently, machine learning technologies have dramatically improved the state of the art for numerous robotic system abilities, such as speech and visual recognition, object detection and many other fields (LeCun et al., 2015). Advanced robots, artificial intelligence (AI) robots equipped with machine learning applications, have been introduced at hotels, airports and restaurants. They draw more attention from both consumers and marketers because they are expected to change tourism and hospitality services and consumer experiences. Hence, it is critical that consumer perceptions toward the acceptance of advanced robots are investigated before businesses increase their investment and change facility designs. In the next section, this study explores the major advances and changes to advanced robots and their current uses to suggest a typology for the advanced robots.
1.1 Recent major advances and changes in advanced robots
Advanced AI robots are equipped with various innovative machine learning technologies. The computing ability to perform machine learning analysis and technique has been rapidly expanded because of improvement in data processing capabilities of computer hardware such as CPU and graphic cards. Machine learning is a computational method that uses learning experience to improve task performance (Mohri et al., 2018). Initially, this machine learning technology was applied in the tourism and hospitality areas for big data analysis. For example, tourism websites use AI big data analysis applications with machine learning engines to forecast tourist arrival (Sun et al., 2019).
Current machine learning applications include robotics, voice recognition, self-driving vehicles and many other applications such as face and text recognition in computer vision (Hassanien et al., 2014). Advanced AI robots with various machine learning applications have been introduced in the tourism and hospitality industry (Chen and Wang, 2007). The advanced robots have a high interactivity with consumers, and tourism and hospitality businesses and customers are interested in using the interactive advanced robots. There are ongoing debates about whether it is efficient to use AI robots as an alternative workforce because of their unsatisfactory performance. For example, in 2015, Henn na Hotel (Tokyo, Japan) introduced various AI robots to comprise their entire...