Hong Kong taxi fleet, HKU roll out city's first AI-powered dispatch system
The 'Smart Dispatch Decision System' processes large volumes of real-time data such as road traffic status, weather and battery levels of electric cabs to assign orders, according to taxi fleet SynCab and the Smart Mobility Lab of the university's faculty of engineering.
Drivers who opted to take bookings from the AI-powered dispatch system would be given orders without an option to reject them, which could help shorten the match time, Sonia Cheng Man-yee, founder and executive director of SynCab, said on Monday.
'This could help our vehicles to be more efficient, as well as help enhance service quality and order acceptance rates,' she said. 'Drivers also have to learn to trust the system that the orders given to them will be the best.'
She said the system had a soft launch in January and before a full roll-out on July 14 as it gathered more data, highlighting that orders placed and taken last month both doubled those of June.
SynCab currently operates some 160 vehicles, all of which are equipped with the system. Cheng added that her fleet would be bolstered by up to 425 taxis in the future that also use the system, but stopped short of revealing a timeline.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
South China Morning Post
3 minutes ago
- South China Morning Post
Why ‘Western hegemony is over', learning lessons from Ukraine war: SCMP daily highlights
Catch up on some of SCMP's biggest China stories of the day. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider subscribing The appearance of President Xi Jinping's chief of staff at the Beidaihe resort on Sunday indicates that senior Chinese leaders have started their annual summer break. USA Rare Earth is receiving a surge in investment as America rushes to reduce its reliance on Chinese rare earth magnets. Illustration: Henry Wong The American economist sees China as key to the global energy transition to zero-carbon energy, especially in markets outside US and Europe.
South China Morning Post
33 minutes ago
- South China Morning Post
Alibaba's maps app gets an AI upgrade with Qwen-powered agent
Amap, a mapping and local services provider under Alibaba Group Holding , launched an artificial intelligence (AI) agent on Monday, giving its services a major tech upgrade. Powered by Alibaba's in-house AI models, the agent can navigate roads, plan trips and recommend places to visit using natural language commands such as 'send me to the office' or 'please find a quiet place with a lake view', according to Amap. The AI agent serves as a key consumer-facing tool for Alibaba to deploy its advanced AI models in practical scenarios, an area where China strives to establish leadership despite its foundational models lagging behind those in the US. Amap, a maps app and ride-hailing platform, has said it has 1 billion active users. Alibaba, owner of the Post and one of China's leading tech firms investing heavily in AI, called Amap's new tool the first 'AI-native' agent designed for mapping services. An Amap sign seen at the company's offices in Beijing. Photo: Shutterstock Named Teacher Xiaogao, the agent features autonomous reasoning capabilities and uses a diverse array of large AI models co-developed with Alibaba's Tongyi Lab, the creator of the company's Qwen family of foundational AI models, according to the firm.
South China Morning Post
33 minutes ago
- South China Morning Post
New committee, bailout talk: is China launching a fresh property rescue effort?
China's central bank confirmed on Friday that it had established a new financial stability committee to defuse the nation's mounting debt risks, as a senior government adviser suggested that Beijing needed to inject 1 trillion yuan (US$139 billion) into the property sector to stabilise developers' balance sheets. The suggestion by Yin Zhongli, a counsellor for China's State Council, comes as Beijing continues to wrestle with a four-year property crisis sparked by developer Evergrande Group's default in mid-2021. Yin, also a senior real estate finance expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, warned that developers were still weighed down by high debts despite a recent uptick in home sales in the property market. China's central bank announced in its midyear report on Friday that it had set up a new macroprudential and financial stability committee as part of an ongoing derisking effort. More robust action was needed to help developers liquidate their assets, Yin suggested. 'Given the large capital shortfall facing these companies, I suggest … setting up a dedicated state-backed agency to provide capital injections to property developers that meet certain criteria,' he wrote in the July issue of the Tsinghua Financial Review. The Ministry of Finance should fund the injections by issuing special treasury bonds, with a proposed 1 trillion yuan 'real estate stabilisation trust' set up to channel the funds to eligible developers, Yin said. The funds should be channelled to some or all of the country's 30 largest private property firms, with the government taking convertible preferred shares from the developers with a conversion period of five years or more, he added.
