Have you ever gone to an airport received a less-than-warm welcome from the check-in clerks? You aren't the only one; even French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius implied last week that Frenchmen could stand to be a little nicer to tourists.
Well worry not, because those days may soon be behind you.
French company Thales displayed a collection of machines designed to act as clerks at this week's Paris Air Show. These robots can do everything that their human counterparts can, such as checking ID and reading documents, only quicker and more efficiently, thus offering the "human warmth" of an airport check-in clerk. They'll also apparently serve as immigration officers and border police, according to Popular Science.
Thales says that the robots will create something similar to a database of identities by sharing scans of passengers' faces with other computers around the airport. They will then print the face on the boarding pass in an encrypted form. Gate agents can then uses these scans to make sure the person the robot saw is actually the person they're letting on the plane.
We've already seen robots taking a bigger role in the customer service experience. Hopefully convenience doesn't get replaced with experience, because a robot can check your ID, but it certainly can't tell you where the bathroom is.
