Across the corridors of the Fly Zu Hotel, where the Alibaba Group is applying the latest technology, a cylindrical black robot is about a meter long, with guests passing through food and clean towels.
The robots are part of a high-tech package that Alibaba Group says is drastically reducing the cost of employing human labor and eliminating the need for guests to deal with individuals.
The Fly Zou Hotel opened officially last month with 290 rooms. It uses a technology that Alibaba Group wants to sell to the hotel services sector in the future and represents an opportunity to showcase the group's ingenuity in artificial intelligence.
It is also an experience that tests guest comfort levels for automated business transactions in China, a country where data sharing technologies are often accepted and are often enthusiastically welcomed.
Inside the hotel, the walls with tall, linear gaps emit quiet white light, recalling Hollywood spaceships. Guests are checked into the hotel at pallets that conduct a scan of their faces, passports or other identity documents. Guests with a Chinese ID can scan their faces using their smartphones to book in advance.
In the lifts, guests are re-examined to determine which floors they can climb to, and the doors are opened by another face survey.
Inside the rooms, guests use voice command technology for the Alibaba Group to change the temperature, shut down curtains, adjust lighting and request room service.
In the restaurant, longer robot machines in the form of a capsule are requested by guests through Fly Zou application.
To check their stay, guests press the application button and then close the room and automatically pay for the accommodation through the Alibaba online folder. Wang said this was followed by the cancellation of the scanning data for guests from Alibaba systems.
The hotel employs human beings, but the group declined to specify how many. They include chefs, cleaners and receptionists to help guests sign in in the traditional way for those who do not want to scan their faces and want to use the rooms' electronic keys.
Reuters