IGI Logo

Leading online travel company MakeMyTrip on Monday said it has collaborated 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 and curate holiday packages.

"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," he added.

Currently, the beta version of this integration has been introduced in English and Hindi for flights and holidays customers.

The next stage of 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, said the company.

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 creates the base for users to interact with the platform in any Indian language.

"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," said Sanjay Mohan, Group Chief Technology Officer, MakeMyTrip.

The intuitive interface powered by Azure OpenAI Service's GPT technology, will analyse specific user requirements and sift through thousands of options, to recommend, customize and book holiday packages, transforming what has been a time-consuming process into a quick and hassle-free experience.

It will also summarize hotel reviews, extracting unique traveller impressions, that is cohort specific - whether a solo traveller, business traveller, couple, family, etc.

"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 travelers across India, with trust and security at the core," said Sangeeta Bavi, Executive Director, Digital Natives, Microsoft India.