Expressnews
CHENNAI: In a landmark move, MakeMyTrip has collaboratedwith Microsoft to make travel planning more inclusive and accessible by introducing voice assisted booking in Indianlanguages. The new, in-platform tech stack powered by Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and Azure Cognitive Services, will converse with the user to offer personalized travel recommendations based on their preferences; curate holiday packages based on variable inputs like occasion, budget, activity preferences, time of travel, etc., and even help book these holiday packages. It opens the online travel ecosystem for every strata and demographic across the country. Currently, the beta version of this integration has been introduced in English and Hindi for flights and holidays customers.
The next stage of voice assisted booking flow will cover othertransport offerings. The feature has been embedded into the landing page of the platform and can be activated with a single click.
“We have pioneered offerings at the intersection of e-commerce, travel, and technology, and are proud to introduce a feature that breaks down the barriers of language, literacy, inability to navigate complex app environments, physical impairments, etc,” said, Rajesh Magow, Co-Founder & Group CEO, MakeMyTrip. “This Generative AI integration through our collaboration with Microsoft involves simple visual cues and voice commands in native Indian languages that will alter the landscape of travel bookings hereon forth.”
MakeMyTrip’s latest offering uses the power of AI and Machine Learning to make travel-related solutions all pervasive, no matter the use case or scenario. Microsoft’s large language models and Indic language speech models, coupled with MakeMyTrip’s natural language understanding capability and travel domain content creates the base for users to interact with the platform in any Indian language.
Sanjay Mohan, Group Chief Technology Officer, MakeMyTrip said, “We are delighted to introduce revolutionary changes to our platform that align with our philosophy of leveraging tech to solve real consumer problems. The new update will elevate the user experience and make our platform more inclusive, accessible, and easy to navigate. The beta phase will offer us learnings to further fine-tune all use cases before rolling it out to users at scale. As such, we’ll do a very controlled roll-out of this feature with a subset of our customers.“
Sangeeta Bavi, Executive Director, Digital Natives, Microsoft India, said, “MakeMyTrip is a pioneer in the travel industry, and we are honored to work together to define the next frontiers of AI driven innovation and customer engagement in the online travel industry. Bringing together MakeMyTrip’s expertise with Microsoft’s AI capabilities, including Microsoft Azure OpenAIService, our collaboration will help make travel more inclusive and accessible for travelers across India, with trust and security at the core.”
The intuitive interface powered by Azure OpenAI Service’s GPT technology, will analyse specific user requirements and sift through thousands of options, to recommend, customize and book holiday packages, transforming what has been a time-consuming process into a quick and hassle-free experience. It will also summarize hotel reviews, extracting unique traveller impressions, that is cohort specific – whether a solo traveller, business traveller, couple, family, etc. This will elevate the hotel booking experience by offering personalized and relevant information to the user without having to scroll through multiple reviews.
