Expedia Group and Kayak are the first travel companies to integrate
with OpenAI’s ChatGPT artificial intelligence-powered chatbot.
The two companies have created plugins for ChatGPT so the platform
can access their data when responding to inquiries from users.
In a blog post Thursday announcing the availability of plugins,
OpenAI’s Yaniv Markovski writes, “ChatGPT will intelligently decide
between calling a plugin and handling a user’s query using its intrinsic
knowledge. For example, the model may decide that a question about
current events requires calling a browser plugin, but may feel
comfortable answering a very simple math or science question without
using a plugin. The user can always nudge the model to use a plugin by
asking the model to use a plugin explicitly, like 'Use Expedia to plan
my NYC trip.'”
Using Kayak’s plugin, consumers can have more conversational
interactions with its search engine. For example, if someone asks, “I’m
looking for a hotel in New York City that’s close to Central Park,”
ChatGPT can understand the request and ask Kayak to provide suitable
recommendations, which when clicked take the user to Kayak's website or
app.
“We’ve had several chat products in the past – voice and text-based -
and initially it wasn’t a great experience to go through all these
results ... but when you are in early exploration … I think there are a
lot of use cases for having ChatGPT support you in that and that’s
really exciting,” says Matthias Keller, chief scientist at Kayak.
“Right now we can see the beginning of a few examples like searching
for a flight and hotel in the same question or asking it to compare
destinations. It’s definitely very impressive technology.
Similarly, using Expedia’s plugin, ChatGPT users can get details on
specific flights, accommodations – including rentals from Vrbo - and
experiences and then click through to Expedia to book their trip.
When asked if Expedia Group will also integrate ChatGPT technology
into the search function on its brand websites, chief technology officer
Rathi Murthy said via email, “It’s safe to assume that we’re continuing
to experiment with this technology.”
Kayak says its work with OpenAI began only a few weeks ago, and
Keller says he has been impressed with the company’s careful approach to
user privacy.
“For instance, we don’t see the conversations. We see that ChatGPT
wants to have flight prices from [for example] New York to San
Francisco, but we have no insight into how it was asked, how the
decision was made, how the whole conversation looks. This is all
abstracted from us,” Keller says.
“If I search, the only information available is that it is a person
from Massachusetts searching. So it is very limited insight we have, but
we definitely will be interested in finding out what people are trying
to do and how to support these use cases better.”
Along with Expedia and Kayak, plugins have been created by OpenTable,
Shopify, Instacart, Slack, Klarna and several other companies. ChatGPT
is inviting its Plus subscribers to join a waitlist to get access to
plugins, with plans to roll them out more widely in the future.
In February, Trip.com launched a chatbot within its mobile app that is built on an API from OpenAI and has functionality similar to ChatGPT.
Source: PhocusWire