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After launching the in-app booking service ixibook, the Gurgaon-based, travel search marketplace, ixigo, has launched ‘ixibaba’.
Ixibaba is an artificial intelligence(AI) chatbot designed to simplify the lives of travellers. The ixibaba has a human-like-persona of a savvy ‘baba’. The bot provides quick and quirky answers to all the travel planning and booking related queries.
The AI powered bot is designed to help the travelers plan their trip by availing information on topics across flights, hotels, buses, cabs, places to visit, vacation destinations and more. The users will now have an option to either use ixigo’s proprietary meta-search engine or the chatbot’s help to find the cheapest travel deals. Ixibaba is also intelligently packaged to tell weather forecast of the destination, show a list of things that can be searched to do in a city and even find offbeat adventure activities.
Aloke Bajpai, co-founder & CEO of ixigo, said, “A first-of-its-kind innovation in the Indian travel space, this development is in line with the advances in chat technology and customer interaction.”
Rajnish Kumar, CTO & co-founder of ixigo, said that ixigo took one year to build ixibaba and it will continue evolving as it learns from real interactions with travelers. The chatbot has been tested with over 1000 users and claims to have nearly 80% accuracy in recognizing travel related queries.
Ixigo was launched in 2007 by Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar, as a travel search marketplace. It now connects over 80 Mn travellers with content & deals from over 25,000 online & offline travel & hospitality businesses. In March this year, ixigo announced the launch of in-app booking service ixibook for which it collaborated with travel portal ClearTrip and branded budget-hotel marketplace OYO Rooms as its launch partners for flights and hotels respectively.
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