Introducing Acquaint - an AI sidekick for digital signage

 Today we are rolling out Acquaint, a unique addition to the Revel Digital ecosystem which leverages agentic AI on the edge to provide a truly interactive experience for your users. AI has seen dramatic, exponential growth recently and for good reason. The latest AI models have reached a point to where interacting with an AI agent is largely indistinguishable from a human. While AI, or something akin to AI, has been utilized in some form or another for a number of years in the digital signage space, it has mostly been for object/face detection, people counting, or more recently image generation. The next gen AI models have much more capability in the agent space where AI is used as a tool for interpreting user requests, analyzing various forms for data, potentially acting on that data, and generating a response in a human friendly format. The general term for this is agentic AI and is commonly utilized alongside LLMs, or large language models, and various tools for retrieving and acting on data.

So what is it?

Essentially Acquaint is a side-kick for digital signage which can provide a human like interface to your kiosks, signage, or even in a headless environment. Acquaint is able to listen for and interpret a question, infer a response based on scheduled content, and provide a concise, human friendly response either to a display, or audibly. While there is no strict requirement for an actual display component (e.g. kiosk), the Acquaint bot is able to trigger content or perform other actions on your signage based on the context of the user interaction. 

Use cases

Food lockers

An example use case for Acquaint are self-service food lockers which are gaining popularity as a way to provide hot food options in corporate break rooms or for restaurant take-out. These are fully automated with a kiosk for food selection and purchase. In this instance Acquaint has been integrated as an agent for answering questions not only on the available food items, but also on any other aspect of the interaction including questions on how to make a purchase. When someone approaches the locker, Acquaint will initiate a conversation. The user has the ability to simply ask questions with Acquaint both answering audibly and triggering specific actions on the kiosk such as presenting the purchase screen for a specific food item.

Hotel concierge

Another example is a hotel kiosk which acts as a concierge. Hotel operators would schedule content for Acquaint which might include local entertainment and food options, shuttle schedules, available hotel amenities, etc. When paired with digital signage, Acquaint would be able to present on the display information related to the users query such as a website or a video managed by the Revel CMS. As with the food locker use case, the convenience is the ability to simply ask a question without having to navigate the traditional menu systems that would found on traditional touch screen kiosks.

How does it work?

Acquaint has been integrated into the Revel Digital ecosystem as a first class device with manageability similar to any other device in the CMS. Content is scheduled to the Acquaint bot similar to a traditional signage player, which the bot then uses as reference material for it's intelligence. For example, let's say you have a number of PDF's with marketing material you wish to associate with the bot. Simply upload those PDF's to your Revel Digital account, add those items to a playlist, and schedule the playlist to Acquaint. This scheduling allows for fine grained control over what the bot 'knows' based on your scheduling conditions such as date and time. Say for example you have a restaurant kiosk with separate menus for lunch and dinner. It would make sense to schedule the two menus based on time of day in order to limit Acquaints knowledge to only the relevant menu items.

The technology

Acquaint is using the latest hardware from Nvidia to power AI on the edge with the ability to run 100% offline - no internet connection required. Edge based AI provides faster response times than cloud based solutions by eliminating the latency and sometimes intermittent nature internet connections. Acquaint is also utilizing the very latest AI models to ensure not only quality inferencing, but also high quality text-to-speech audio.

Specialized AI hardware from Nvidia

The future?

It has become clear that AI is here to stay, the question becomes where does it actually have utility and long-term value. We think these conversational AI agents certainly have a place, especially with the recent advancements in AI which are remarkable in their ability to understand and communicate in ways that feel surprisingly natural.

As these technologies keep improving, we see many ways they could shake things up — from customer service and education to healthcare and creative work. It’s an exciting time, and we’re just starting to see what’s possible.

For more information on Acquaint please visit our website:

https://www.reveldigital.com/acquaint-agentic-ai-for-digital-signage