Online travel portal Yatra.com has launched an artificial intelligence based Yatra Universal Virtual Assistant (YUVA) for travel booking. The platform allows the user to use both voice and text to communicate with YUVA and complete the booking on the go. YUVA is available on desktop, Android, IOS, Google Assistant and Facebook Messenger.
Supporting various Indian accents, YUVA enables intuitive customer interaction in a relatively human-like way, answering questions related to flight bookings and providing expertise in real time. No longer do customers need to search through content on the company’s website, instead they can now interact directly with YUVA and uncover the information they need in an instant, said Yatra.com.
The users can search and book flights, apply multiple filters, rearrange options with different sort orders and modify bookings. The user can provide the complete information in a single sentence or talk to YUVA and provide the relevant information in a form of a communication. For example, ‘Show me refundable non-stop flights from Delhi to Mumbai for next Sunday morning on Indigo‘ or ‘Me and my wife want to go Delhi from Mumbai in business class on Christmas.’
“Yatra has been pushing the boundaries of Artificial Intelligence to deliver a convenient and enhanced booking experience for our customers. YUVA is an amalgamation of Yatra’s in-house Natural Language Processing module all connected with a proprietary backend for conversation steering. We are delighted with the launch of YUVA at a time when the market and the customer is continuously evolving. It will change the customer experience by replacing clicks with sustained conversations and personalised interactions,” said Manish Amin, Co-Founder & CIO, Yatra.com.
The future versions of YUVA will feature multi-lingual support starting with Hindi followed by other important regional languages and will be assisting the customers in hotel and holiday bookings as well, said company.
