Travel marketplace Ixigo to give voice to its search facility

Priyanka PaniMumbai, February 12

Mumbai, February 12

Travel and hotel ticketing marketplace ixigo.com says that its users can now book travel by simply talking to the app. The Gurgaon-based ticketing aggregator will be the first among the online travel aggregators to launch a voice-based virtual assistant on its app. Christened Tara, the voice-assistant will become live by the end of second quarter and is targeted towards first-time smartphone users in smaller towns.

Talking to BusinessLine, Rajnish Kumar, Co-founder and CTO of Ixigo.com said that voice-based searches are becoming popular and that the future of UI will be no UI at all. voice assistants will be able to provide end-to-end solution from searching to booking and even check-out.

Kumar said that Tara is completely based on deep machine learning and will have regional languages.

Way forward

“The next 100 million users are from mostly tier 3 towns and these users will be using smartphone for the first time and do not know how to manoeuvre inside an app and voice becomes an important element here,” Kumar said adding that voice-based search in India is at 28 per cent and of that 80 per cent comes from the smaller cities. Kumar said that the Ixigo’s focus for 2018 is to drive growth in the smaller towns, from where 30 per cent of its current traffic is coming from. Ixigo claims to be number two in the OTA segment in at 15 million users. The market leader is Makemytrip and Goibibo combined together.

Ixigo’s plan is to grow 3x at 45 million users by end of 2019 and majority of that will come from rural India.

“Our software can also predict whether your train tickets will be confirmed or not or when will the fares of the flights drop. Our apps will also act as GPS to locate the exact position of a train, which is now being done manually,” Kumar said adding that this feature is 90% accurate.

Besides, the Sequoia and Fosun-invested startup is looking to aggregate food portals on its app to help passengers order food while on the go.

The company is also working on building its native payment gateway to have a better grip on the failure rates. “At present, we don’t control payments and hence cannot control the failures while checking out. We will soon have all kind of payment mechanism except Paytm,”Kumar added

Published on February 12, 2018
TOPICS
e-commerce and e-business
software

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