Artificial intelligence is introducing itself in our lives, from chatbots like Siri to complex tools that replicate our tastes, robots are learning from us and they might become our best travel mates. Just few days ago, Google revealed in its I / O conference its effort to focus totally on AI, something already anticipated when it introduces the predictive autocomplete in Search.
One of the innovations is the update of Google Assistant, an application that was born as Siri or Alexa, integrating the rest of the Google applications, as well as searches. This has enormous implications, since this application with the soul of a concierge can search our flights, reserve a table in a restaurant, buy our vacation package, as well as look for curiosities, send calendar invitations or make calls.
Facebook, Google, Twitter and other leading mobile technology companies are recommending us where to go and what route to take according to the traffic in the area, adding our events to the calendar, and warning of possible strikes. All of that using AI.
Taking out a bit of stress can make our lives easier and one of the key areas that are redoubling their efforts in the construction of audiobots, chatbox and others bots is the travel industry. We are already enjoying many of the innovations and the best is yet to come. Have a look at how AI is changing the way we travel:
Planning the trip
The options are endless and although the mail softwares are doing the best they can, many times we have to search for the name of the departure station or the exact time. It would be great if an app notifies us directly about our imminent trip.
Buying and booking are also part of a continuous search, sometimes we would like to have a secretary looking for the most convenient options, but the truth is that with a little help from a real travel agent, AI can make great advances.
This is what happens with Mezi, a web application in which the preferences that users write in a chat are understood by a software that automatically sends travel assistants a series of tags that contains all the information and increase the speed of their work.
Taking travel photographs
Google has also presented in its conference Clip, a smart software integrated in a camera that adheres to the mobile phone and records all day what happens. Once the high resolution images have been downloaded, the user must select the most interesting content of the day, achieving something that social networks never have: spontaneity.
Making the selection, however, is an arduous task for the user, so the software expects to learn over time which kind of moments make a good fit for the users.
Most of us would not like the idea of being recorded all the time with Clip. The reaction of the people will determine the success of this technology in particular.
Eating abroad: goodbye diets
When we go on a trip, we usually eat the first thing we want, taste the local delicacies and then feel guilty or even bad for the extra caloric intake. The last thing we want on vacation is to worry about dieting. However, this Fitgenie nutrition app goes one step beyond the applications in which we introduce everything we eat and learn from our tastes.
It needs a bit of support on our part. We need to introduce in the app what we eat, how many calories it has and our diet, so that the app will improve their menus and diets to our particular taste with a bit of time.
Meeting friends
Moving in a new city, meeting friends, going to different places are a very important part of the trip. Normally, when we move around the city it is difficult for us to call or search among the messages where to find others, it is easier to share the location on a map.
Location sharing apps are now a reality. Millions of users use Wave Application to meet their friends in the city, see where they have gone to, go to have dinner or find themselves on a trip, among other situations. In this case, applications such as Wave that use private geolocation, have places very welled thanks to a need of users: keep their privacy.
In the field of artificial intelligence, the possibilities of optimizing this service are endless. For example, a location based service with AI could suggest us to share the location with somebody if we are going to meet this person. Meeting friends or family is a daily activity and it is not surprising that artificial intelligence improves this part of our life in the near future.
Finding the ideal travel companions
In a connected world, traveling with someone who shares our same tastes is very comfortable and that is why there are so many web directories, forums and social travel applications. However, one step further would be to apply the matching engineering used by some dating apps to this topic and find the ideal travel companions.
For the moment, the closest thing to that is Grip, an application of business events that seeks to suggest and recommend in the events the interaction of some workers with others, since the most valuable connections can accelerate business agreements.
Currently, artificial intelligence is already learning from our transfers to inform us of the traffic in the area without our request, strikes, or the addresses of our friends.
As we see, artificial intelligence is now an assistant that is getting more and more more proactive. Maybe one day AI will choose our holidays and take away the stress of planning them. If it works well.
Pablo Clemente Pérez 