We let an AI loose in a science museum.
5,012 people walked up and talked to it.
For nine days, HeyWowza stood in Technopolis and answered anyone who pressed the button. Then we read every single conversation. Here’s what 5,012 of them taught us, with the numbers to prove it.
It wasn’t toilets, opening hours or parking.
On average, each visitor asked 3.5 questions. And the single biggest category wasn’t the practical stuff. It was visitors trying to understand what they were looking at.
They weren’t just looking things up.
Visitors aren’t only using the assistant for practical information. They’re using it to understand what they’re experiencing. A few other categories stood out:
A small note on the data: every question was placed in one category only. Real visitor messages often mix things together. “You’re stupid, where is the toilet?” becomes wayfinding, not abuse, because the real intent wins. That keeps the categories clean and easy to compare.
AI in visitor environments isn’t just about answering FAQs. It’s about understanding what visitors need in the moment: orientation, explanation, recommendations, reassurance, play, and sometimes just a little bit of chaos.
Three languages, one clear favourite.
This is simply the mix of languages visitors picked on the kiosk before they started. Dutch ran away with it, while French and English split the rest.
And then it started to remember.
When two people ask near-identical things, HeyWowza recognises it and replays the answer from memory instead of rebuilding it from scratch. Skip the heavy thinking, skip re-recording the voice, just answer.
Memory, day by day.
Each bar is the share of answers served straight from memory. The trend only goes one way: up and to the right.
Remembering is 6× cheaper and 3× faster.
A fresh answer runs the full pipeline. A remembered one barely breaks a sweat. Same visitor, same question, wildly different bill.
And where does the time go?
Half of every reply is HeyWowza looking things up, searching its knowledge base (RAG) for the right facts before it ever opens its mouth. That’s the bottleneck, and the next thing we’re optimising.
5,012 hellos, and it’s only getting smarter.
People treat a good AI like a person, so we built one worth talking to, that learns from every conversation and gets cheaper and faster as it goes. This is what HeyWowza does in the wild.
Give people something genuinely curious to talk to, and they’ll keep coming back to understand the world around them.
Source: HeyWowza interaction logs in BigQuery · kiosk “HeyWowza” · 14–22 Feb 2026 · 5,012 turns · 13.1% overall cache hit rate · 0.20% error rate. Numbers rounded for readability.
