# Release Notes: Smart Kiosk Assistant

## 2026.1.0

The initial release of Smart Kiosk Assistant marks the launch of a voice-enabled
interactive application for retail, QSR, Airlines and other customer-facing
environments. The application has the following features:

- Designed as a conversational AI experience, it enables users to engage
  naturally through speech and receive intelligent, spoken responses
  in real time.
- The platform brings together speech recognition, retrieval-augmented
  generation, and text-to-speech in a seamless, end-to-end voice
  interaction flow.
- With browser-based voice capture and natural audio playback, the experience
  feels intuitive, responsive, and ready for real-world engagement.
- Smart Kiosk Assistant grounds every response in an ingestible local knowledge
  base, helping deliver more relevant, context-aware, and business-specific
  answers.
- Its integrated AI stack combines kiosk UI, orchestration, speech-to-text,
  retrieval, and speech synthesis into a unified deployment-ready application.
- The experience is further enhanced by built-in visibility into model KPIs and
  live performance data, including runtime model details and latency metrics.
- Optimized for local and edge deployment, the application leverages OpenVINO
  acceleration on Intel hardware for efficient AI inference.
- Docker Compose packaging and flexible configuration make the solution easy to
  deploy, adapt, and scale across enterprise environments.
- This launch establishes Smart Kiosk Assistant as a strong foundation for
  immersive, intelligent, and voice-first digital engagement experiences.