Meet Our Robot Tour Guide: A Fresh Twist on Information Day
In celebration of HKUST's 35th anniversary, the University drew around 55,000 visitors to campus for a vibrant Information Day on 31 October 2026. From academic programmes to campus facilities and student life, visitors had plenty to discover throughout the day.
Amid the buzz across campus, the Library welcomed visitors with 3 different guided tours: a staff-led library tour, a guided tour of the 1/F Exhibition, and, for the first time, a robot-guided tour. Making its debut this year, our robot tour guide brought a fresh twist to the library tour experience.
Path Guiding Robot
The Path Guiding Robot follows a pre-set route through the Library, stopping at designated points to introduce our spaces and services through short videos. For its Information Day debut, we designed a 15-minute route on G/F, with the robot guiding visitors through 12 selected stops along the way.
But getting our new robot tour guide ready for the big day took some teamwork. The Library planned the tour route and stops and prepared the video content for each location, while the HKUST BIM Lab project team took care of the technical side, from navigation setup and checkpoint calibration to repeated test runs.
Teaching AI to Speak Cantonese
The Library's role may sound simple, but preparing the tour content came with a few unexpected challenges! As one of the team members producing the videos, my job was mainly to turn the scripts into AI-generated speech and combine the audio with images. Sounds easy enough, right? In reality, getting the AI voice to sound natural took plenty of trial and error.
Since Cantonese was the main language of the tour, we used Narakeet to generate the voice-over. One challenge was the way we naturally mix Cantonese and English in Hong Kong. While the AI voice handled Cantonese well, its English pronunciation did not always blend naturally into a Cantonese sentence. We therefore had to rethink some of the English terms in the scripts and replace them with suitable Cantonese expressions while keeping the narration natural.
Even Chinese characters could be tricky. Some characters have multiple Cantonese pronunciations depending on the context, and AI does not always get it right. For example, the character 「片」 in 「偵探懸疑片」and 「經典港產片」should be pronounced pin2, but the AI sometimes read it as pin3. Our workaround was simple: we replaced the character in the AI input with a homophone (「貵」 for 「片」) that produced the pronunciation we wanted (big thanks to the Cantonese Character Database!). It looked strange in the script, but sounded just right in the final video!
A Successful Debut
All the preparation paid off on Information Day. The robot-guided tours proved popular, with dozens of visitors joining each of the 5 sessions. Seeing visitors follow our robot guide around the Library made all the testing and fine-tuning worthwhile. For us, it was not only a successful debut, but also a glimpse into new ways technology can enhance the library experience. We look forward to exploring where our robot guide might take us next.
June Or
Officer (User Services)
lbjune@ust.hk
