Learn from the CTO of the world’s sixth-most downloaded travel app. Travel is to expand your horizons. If it had been better, it would have been less complicated and not wrought with distractions in the form of innumerable alternatives to the medium of the tour and life. Technology is again the savior here. One such business enterprise leaping soar and limiting a wide variety of energetic users these days based on the notion above is ixigo.
Ixigo is one of the quickest-developing tour companies in India. With almost 21 million predominantly mobile monthly energetic users and 90 million downloads throughout apps, ixigo is now India’s second most used cellular journey platform. The corporation has a visible 6x boom in transactions, touching 1 million passenger bookings consistent with month through its platform for flights, lodges, buses, and trains.
Train seat availability prediction
Rajnish Kumar, CTO and co-founder of ixigo believes that the benefit of being inside the industry for more than a decade is that “you get hold of a ton of facts.”
The commencement of AI has also proved positive for the organization. Ixigo’s’ liaison with the era started out when the agency was inexperienced in lighting its train product. “That is when we realized that we are able to use AI to clear up a number of the problems that had been almost impossible to resolve earlier. Case in point being records-pushed predictive use instances consisting of train seat availability prediction,” says Kumar. For example, trains have trouble with demand and delivery. Out of 25 million travelers on an everyday foundation, 10 million nonetheless get waitlisted. “One of the most important ache regions returned in 2014-15 changed into one in whicht human beings did not know if their waitlisted price tag had been showing or no longer. Since we had sufficient facts thanks to access to hundreds of PNR searches regularly, we thought, why not construct an algorithm based on those records to expect PNR reputation,” says Kumar.
Kumar recognizes this development as having caused a big organic growth in app downloads.
Innovation and lengthy-time period bets
Ixigo’s definition of innovation differs barely from the rest. Kumar’s perception is unconventionally rooted in investing in low-ROI issues that may not have immediate consequences but ensure long-term benefits. “Very few firms have the courage and time to put money into those problems. That is one of the key matters that has led to our growth over time,” he says.
Ixigo has been strategizing for some time now with the concept of voice and AI aggregate, catering to the subsequent billion customers exposed to apps and this atmosphere for the first time. “This makes it very difficult for them to navigate every bespoke app as each has its user interface. The maximum natural manner for them to interact with them is voice,” he says. This caused the creation of a voice-based virtual assistant, TARA.
“We have the right of entry to several records, which also consist of patron interaction statistics, emails, and chats carried out by our customer service agents, all of which are fed into our gadget. Based on these aesthetics, we constructed a natural language engine that could answer journey questions,” he says. The first version was released in 2012, and in 2015, it was relaunched as a chatbot known as Alibaba.
But then the company discovered the largest amount of electricity this engine had turned into in its capability to clear up customer support troubles honestly. This resulted in the introduction of a customer service version, TARA, delivered in the apps. “The scale at which we’re coping with a consumer base of over one hundred million, today eighty% of our customer support queries are being solved using TARA and most effective 20% of the queries get to human sellers,” Kumar adds. It took ixigo approximately six months to educate TARA on customer support queries, which turned into advanced in-residence by a group of 4 human beings.
Additionally, ixigo built some device mastering fashions to assist users in navigating the apps. “The gadget will now be intelligent enough to spark off the person on the right factor of time with navigation tips on the booking or payment phase, enabling a continuing person adventure specifically for our train users,” Kumar concludes.
