avatarin, an AI customer-service subsidiary spun out of ANA Holdings, launched a 24/7 multilingual voice-AI retail agent on OpenAI's GPT-Realtime, partnering with Yamada Denki — one of Japan's largest electronics retailers. The two-week Yamada Denki online-mall trial served roughly 30,000 shoppers, and 92% of surveyed users rated the experience positively.
"This isn't an extension of conventional chatbots — it's an attempt to expand the possibilities of customer service through AI," says Akira Fukabori, avatarin's CEO. Fukabori chose GPT-Realtime because a single model can fuse voice, text, and visual understanding in one conversation. "Its performance surpassed dedicated voice-recognition systems we've seen. It handles voice, text, and images with low latency — that is why we chose GPT-Realtime. The technology no longer requires people to adapt to the machine; it adapts more naturally to how people communicate."
Japan's consumer-electronics retail sector has long wrestled with how to give customers expert sales support after store hours when staffing is tight.
avatarin had earlier worked with OpenAI APIs internally on speech recognition, query analysis, and staff training. The Kurashi-Marugoto AI agent marks the team's first deployment bringing those capabilities directly in front of shoppers.
The Kurashi-Marugoto system layers retrieval-augmented generation over Yamada Denki's product catalog so answers stay anchored in real product data, while GPT-Realtime handles conversational turn-taking at low latency. avatarin encoded Yamada Denki's category-specific sales experience into dialogue flow and prompts, with guardrails keeping the conversation centered on shopping. Fukabori contrasts the agent with reactive chatbots: "Customers don't want a chatbot — they want intelligence. 'I have four people in my family, I need a fridge, but my kitchen is small. Which one should I choose?' That is what real customer service looks like." The agent proactively continues questioning rather than waiting for the next prompt.
During the two-week trial the agent handled roughly 30,000 shoppers with 24/7 multilingual coverage, and 92% of survey respondents rated the experience positively. Customers called the agent "easier to talk to than a real salesperson" and valued the no-pressure ability to ask the same question repeatedly. Each conversation ends with a short voice survey, making feedback a natural extension of the shopping experience.
avatarin's longer-term direction is a single agent operating across web, phone, and physical stores with consistent context, so a customer can pick up the same conversation in any channel. With Yamada Holdings spanning consumer electronics, housing, and financial services, Fukabori frames the ambition as making AI a trusted daily-life companion: "We hope people experience, at every interface, an intelligence that reflects each company's identity. The era of single-purpose AI is over. I believe OpenAI will lead the next era of general-purpose multimodal intelligence."