MakeMyTrip to use generative AI to offer personalized travel tips, review summary

Travel aggregator MakeMyTrip will use generative AI to provide personalized travel recommendations to its customers, summarize hotel reviews, and recommend curated holiday packages. A voice-assisted booking feature in Indian languages will be rolled out later, the company added. 

The Gurugram-based company announced on Monday that it has partnered with Microsoft and will use Azure OpenAI and Azure Cognitive services to enhance the travel booking experience for customers and make it easier for them to navigate through busy app interfaces. 

“Proud to introduce a feature that breaks down the barriers of language, literacy, inability to navigate complex app environments, physical impairments,” said Rajesh Magow, Co-Founder and Group CEO of MakeMyTrip. 

The firm said that new features powered by Azure Open AI will be available in beta versions in English and Hindi for flight and holiday booking segments.

“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,” said Sanjay Mohan, Group Chief Technology Officer of MakeMyTrip. 

Sangeeta Bavi, Executive Director, Digital Natives at Microsoft India, noted that the collaboration between the two companies will make travel more inclusive and accessible for travelers across India. 

Launched in January, Microsoft Azure Open AI service provides application programming interface (API) access to OpenAI's large language models (LLM) including GPT-4, GPT-3, Codex, and Embeddings. Azure Cognitive service offers cloud-based AI services for building cognitive intelligence into apps. It includes speech services such as text-to-speech and speech-to-text. 

MakeMyTrip’s Mohan told TechCircle in an interview last month that the firm was in talks with multiple service providers to deploy generative AI for summarization and other use cases on their platform. 

Prior to this, MakeMyTrip has been using AI to offer a price lock functionality to ensure price fluctuations don't dampen travel plans and also to show dates when the flight fares will be the lowest. 

Several companies in India including Flipkart and Air India are exploring the adoption of generative AI, especially ChatGPT’s underlying model GPT, to offer better experiences to customers. 

Another travel aggregator, Kayak integrated ChatGPT plugins in March to offer a chatbot that can give personalized travel recommendations to customers.