Taxis in Japan Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Predict Ride Requests

On a Friday evening, it's fairly easy to guess the downtown hot spots where taxis likely are needed. But most of the time, cab drivers have little more than intuition to go on to find their next fare. That could change for cab drivers in Japan when NTT Docomo commercializes its artificial intelligence technology, which predicts where ride requests will be. Using ridership data from 4,425 cabs, along with other factors such as weather and mobile phone data and locations, NTT Docomo trained its AI system to predict where localized ride demand will be in 30 minutes within a 500-square-meter area. Drivers participating in its trials used tablets that provided updated ridership data every 10 minutes, which gave drivers enough time to reposition their vehicle based on anticipated requests.