This summer, we brought AutoAssist, Avanti R&D’s conversational AI technology, to the City of Torrance’s World Cup watch parties. Visitors could walk up, ask questions in English, Spanish, or Japanese, and explore local dining, event information, and soccer through conversation, games, and match displays. Across two event days, AutoAssist supported 262 spoken conversations, giving us a firsthand look at how people use AI as a local guide.
Originally shared as four LinkedIn posts, the series below follows AutoAssist from preparation to public debut. It explores the thinking behind its on-device processing, the features that shaped the visitor experience, and what we learned along the way.
Part 1
In 40 days, a quiet experiment begins in Los Angeles.
On June 13th, the City of Torrance, California will host its first-ever Watch Party for the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
At its center will be AutoAssist—the conversational Edge-AI platform we’ve developed at Avanti R&D, deployed as the event’s expert guide.
Why call it an experiment? Because what we’re really putting forward is not a technology, but a question:
“What should guidance in public spaces actually look like?”
Walk through any train station, retail venue, or tourist site today, and you’ll see digital signage. Bright, polished, information-rich. But entirely one-way. The screen doesn’t ask what the visitor is looking for, or what they’re struggling with.
We want to change that and providing AutoAssist at the Watch Parties on June 13th and July 11th is our attempt at an answer.
Visitors speak in their own language. AutoAssist responds, conversationally. All information stays safely at the edge—no sending of your voice data to the internet. It works even if networks fail. Even during disasters.
Over the next 40 days, I’ll be sharing the journey toward implementation. If you’re working in Edge AI, tourism, or public-space DX, we’d love for you to follow along.
If you’d like to visit on-site in Torrance, drop us a message anytime.
#EdgeAI #DigitalSignage #FIFAWorldCup2026 #SmartCity #InboundTourism #AvantiRnD
Part 2
“Why not just use cloud AI?”
Over the three years of AutoAssist development, this has been the question we’ve been asked most often.
The capabilities of modern cloud AI are remarkable. With nothing more than a smartphone, anyone today can access sophisticated conversational AI. So why, as a technology creator, would we deliberately implement AutoAssist as an Edge AI system, a technically harder path?
Due to the weight of responsibility that deploying systems in public spaces carry.
We imagined the realities that can occur for visitors:
▸ Ten minutes of lost connectivity in an underground level
▸ Three-second response delays during congested network events
▸ Hundreds of visitors simultaneously requesting evacuation information just after a power outage recovers
▸ Privacy-conscious visitors hesitating to send conversation data to the cloud
These are not “edge-case risks”, they are everyday realities in public spaces. Realities that we have experienced firsthand.
Cloud AI does not perform reliably in any of these conditions. Not because it is technically inferior, but because its entire design assumes continuous connectivity.
We built AutoAssist from a different starting point.
“Connectivity cannot be a prerequisite. The system must operate autonomously, even in isolation.”
From this base assumption, AutoAssist’s architecture took shape. All conversational processing happens completely at the edge. No data leaves the device. The downstream effects are sub-second response is guaranteed while complying with privacy laws around the world. This is a result of our single design philosophy.
On June 13th, AutoAssist will operate as an expert guidance system at a World Cup 2026 Watch Party hosted by the City of Torrance, California. What kind of experience does this Edge-AI choice deliver to visitors? We will examine this through data and direct observation.
#EdgeAI #ConversationalAI #PublicInfrastructure #BCP #AvantiRnD
Part 3
2 days to implementation. Last week, City of Torrance staff conducted a hands-on demonstration of our AI kiosk.
On Monday, June 1st, three representatives from the City of Torrance visited Avanti R&D’s Los Angeles office for a live demonstration of AutoAssist.
▶ See how AutoAssist actually engages in conversation in a short video.
After experiencing and engaging in conversation with the system, we received overwhelming positive feedback on everything from the look and feel of the mascot character, designed by our media partner from Japan, AX-ON, Inc., to the quality and accuracy of the responses.
What stood out most from this demo was a technical choice the city staff specifically appreciated.
In their own words, they made the connection between the accuracy of responses with the fact that it is drawing on its local knowledge base.
This was the moment when the design philosophy we shared in Post 2, about utilizing local info within the edge and autonomous content management, aligned with the actual concerns of real-world operators.
This week, June 13th, AutoAssist will operate as the local expert event guide at the World Cup 2026 Watch Party in Downtown Torrance.
On-site visits and virtual walkthroughs remain available.
We’ll continue sharing data and observations here on LinkedIn.
Get your tickets here if you want to watch the games. Or if you want to stop by and experience the kiosk yourself, we will be at our booth on the corner of El Prado Ave and Sartori Ave. See you on game day!
#EdgeAI #ConversationalAI #FIFAWorldCup2026 #Torrance #PublicSpaceDX #AvantiRnD
Part 4
We dropped a 6-foot AI kiosk in the middle of the street at a World Cup watch party. Here is how it went down.
No app to download. Just an intelligent screen, in Downtown Torrance, California, guiding anyone who walked up on where to eat, what was happening, and who really was the GOAT after all. Engaging with visitors. In multiple languages.
Over two event days, June 13 and July 11, Avanti’s AutoAssist ran as the event guide at Kick It in Downtown Torrance.
To cure your World Cup stats hangover, here are the numbers:
→ 262 spoken conversations with visitors across the two days
→ 180 kiosk sessions
→ 3 languages served: English, Spanish and Japanese
→ 161 photos, games and match cards put on screen
→ 2.2 seconds average response time of AutoAssist
2.2 seconds is roughly the same as in a conversation with someone standing next to you. Giving an engaging and personable, usable feel to the system.
Another nugget of info that revealed itself came from looking at what people actually asked.
Visitors treated the kiosk as a local expert:
• “Where is the best restaurant around here?”
• “What time does Torrance Bakery close?”
• “Who’s better, Pele or Maradona?”
• “ノルウェーとイングランドはどっちが強いですか?”
None of these is a signage question. A screen at the mall or the airport could not answer them. Filling visitors experience with information to make them feel at ease in a new environment is the whole reason we created AutoAssist.
To make that happen, in between event days we took our learnings and and shipped improvemewnts for the second event:
• Soccer mini-games played: 6 → 39
• Live match cards shown: 9 → 28
• Mid-reply interruptions handled: 0 → 45
That last one mattered the most to us. Visitors at the second game day could now cut in while AutoAsisst was still talking, further creating that user-friendly helpful environment.
And all of this ran on the enclosed system fulfilling the goals for speed and privacy that we laid out in our earlier posts in the series. No data went to some big cloud provider. Nothing to slow down when the network gets crowded, and nothing to leak personally idetifying information.
Thank you to the City of Torrance for the partnership, and to AX-ON, Inc. for the character work that was the finishing touch that the project needed to make a welcoming and engaging experience.
Let us know where you would put this kind of system. A transit station? A hotel lobby? A museum, a stadium concourse, a hospital entrance, a mall information desk, a city hall?
Tell us the setting and the problem you would want it to solve. Leave it in the comments or send us a message. We’d be happy to discuss how AutoAssist could help you launch a custom expert guide for your scenario.
#EdgeAI #ConversationalAI #FIFAWorldCup2026 #Torrance #PublicSpaceDX #SmartCity #AvantiRnD