Meet Louis, the Air France customer assistance chat bot.

Air France announced today the introduction of Louis, its chatbot in Facebook messenger app. Quoting its 10 million followers over its social media platforms, they claim to respond to over 10,000 messages per day. Hence I imagine Louis is there to solve all but the trickiest of issues.

Air France claims the chatbot is secure enough to give your credit card details, and even ask questions in different languages. So I decided to ‘stress test' Louis by mixing and matching languages. English, French and Spanish for the time being (please don't judge my dodgy French!).

It identified French fine, as you would hope, but Spanish went undetected.

Hmmm, ok. Let's mix things a bit.

Louis is expected to work alongside Amazon Alexa with passengers being able to check the status of their flight and ask about on board services amongst other tasks.

While superficially it seems like the ‘modern trend' for companies to be offering voice-activated control, I'm especially supportive if it improves accessibility especially for blind, visually-impaired or motor-deficient passengers who struggle with the precision many mobile apps typically require.