Melbourne Airport Activation
A talking Christmas koala that helped travellers find their way.
- Client
- Melbourne Airport
- With
- Two-Eyed People
- When
- Christmas 2025
- See it
- Visit ↗
For Melbourne Airport and Two-Eyed People, I built a real-time voice AI agent that turned a standard wayfinding kiosk into a friendly, talking koala travellers could simply ask for help.
The idea
Airport kiosks are useful and almost nobody enjoys them. For Christmas, the airport wanted something warmer: a character you could just talk to, who could point you to your gate, a coffee or the toilets.
What I built
I developed the full application. It combines real-time voice processing, a carefully designed personality, phoneme-based lip-syncing so the koala's mouth matched its words, and privacy-safe facial detection so it knew when someone was actually engaging.
What I learned
Putting conversational AI in a public space raises real questions about transparency, data and whether people know they're talking to a machine. I wrote about it in Are we talking to the walls now?
- 01
Live, natural voice conversation for wayfinding and airport information
- 02
Phoneme lip-sync so the koala's mouth matched its words
- 03
Privacy-safe face detection to know when someone was engaging
“Kids treated it like magic. Adults started hesitant… then leaned in.”
Got something like this in mind?
Big brand or brand new idea, the process is the same: a relaxed chat, an honest plan and a fixed quote. Small business or indie founder? Start here.