Reshaping the travel booking landscape with generative AI

In a landmark move, MakeMyTrip collaborates with Microsoft to make travel planning more inclusive and accessible by introducing voice-assisted booking in Indian languages.

The new, in-platform tech stack powered by Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and Azure Cognitive Services, will converse with the user to offer personalised 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 holiday customers.

The next stage of the voice-assisted booking flow will cover other transport 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 and 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 create 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 honoured 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 OpenAI Service, our collaboration will help make travel more inclusive and accessible for travellers 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, customise, and book holiday packages, transforming what has been a time-consuming process into a quick and hassle-free experience. It will also summarise hotel reviews, extracting unique traveller impressions, that are cohort-specific - whether a solo traveller, business traveller, couple, family, etc. This will elevate the hotel booking experience by offering personalised and relevant information to the user without having to scroll through multiple reviews.