Voice assistants in Travel

With voice fast becoming a major communication channel for consumers, we decided to put it to the test within our notifications technology

The development experience

Amazon know how to write good APIs. Application Programmable Interface - These are the function calls that services provide so that developers can interact with them. Their scripting made using their voice services very simple. Google Home has a very similar set of APIs, so our pilot was easily replicable with that family of devices as well. Overall our developers were amazed about how easy it was to integrate into out application, although that was also down to our channel agnostic architecture designed to be future proof.

The User Experience

There were a few issues we discovered with the Alexa voice processing. For example, here in the UK it’s common to talk about flight numbers like “ZZ1234”. Alexa had a hard time picking up letters spelt out. Saying “FlyAway Airlines 1234” or just “1234” since “FlyAway Airlines” was the name of the skill worked fine. I have given a few demos of this and it generally works first time … amazing for a demo!

It can be a bit more hard to understand with background noise and multiple people talking, for example excited children about to go on holiday. But it can be useful in conjunction with the Alexa app to provide textual information that people can refer to, for example instructions when things go wrong.

Messages and privacy

Since we started the pilot Amazon have added the ability to send notifications to Echo devices. Alexa can then be used to deliver that message and respond. We think this is a great feature that fits our vision of brilliant communications in the travel industry. The one concern we do have is the lack of ability to verify who is receiving the message. With regulations around the world about informing passengers about delay, can you trust that a child hasn’t dismissed the message before an adult has heard it?

We did try using “pass words” that were setup in advance, but it does detract a bit from the ease of use that you get from a voice assistant. It also feels a bit awkward to say random words along with the status command, for example “Alexa ask FlyAway Airlines for status of 1234 strawberry hat frog”.

Conclusion

This isn’t going to be the way of communicating that kills email … just yet. But it does start to make the devices like the Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Cortana more than just toys. They can be a way of making the way of interacting with travel brands feel much more human, really providing a connection. We’d recommend any airlines who aren’t trialing this already to start now.

A version of this post originally appeared on the 15below blog as 15below Tech Take: Voice Technology in Travel