Flight Hassle Info

How painful will that drive to the airport be? A voice agent helps you figure out if the flight is on time and what traffic will be like on the way.

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Inspiration

Honestly, it was a drive to the airport the weekend before Memorial Day that did it: I was picking up my loving Minnesota relatives and got crushed by airport traffic. I figured 10:30pm on a Thursday night would make for an easy pickup, but instead I found myself in a stop & go nightmare. So: could I have known this ahead of time?

What it Does

Using a voice agent, it

  • asks the user for flight info
  • looks up the real-time flight info
  • gives the user an overview of the flight's on-time-ness over the past couple of weeks
  • asks the user if they'd like a drive time estimate
  • looks up the real-time traffic info
  • gives the user a summary of the predicted traffic
  • estimates how much of a hassle this airport trip is going to be

Tools

bolt.new: 100% coded with bolt.new. I vibe-coded most of it, meaning I tried my best not to care about the underlying code. But in some situations I had to dive in to the code, which worked out fine.

ElevenLabs : Seriously, the ElevenLabs voice agent is so good! It was super easy to integrate tools to give the AI access to real-time APIs.

Supabase: The excellent Supabase handles all the API calling via edge functions, and has a couple of tables with cached airport and airline info.

External APIs

AeroAPI: Provides real-time flight info

Google Maps Routes API: Provides real-time and predicted traffic info

Challenges

I'd never used ElevenLabs or either of the two APIs above, so there was a lot of me just coming up to speed on how everything works. I will say the ElevenLabs docs made the integrations surprisingly easy--at this point it would feel super straightforward to integrate a voice agent with a new project.

Timezones have been a huge hassle throughout the project. This is more of an LLM thing, because it's math involving strings...and I suspect there's a lot of code out there that does time math in a hacky way.

Accomplishments

It works! It feels useful! The info is accurate! Honestly that feels like an accomplishment.

Also, I have an actual flight next week and was shocked to see how often it's arrived late the past two weeks, and by how much.

What's Next

Good question! Ideally it would take a broader look at the airport's arrivals/departures, and let the user know how that might affect things. There's a difference between one flight being delayed and 20 other flights being delayed at the same time with thousands of people leaving the airport all at once.

Do people find this project useful? Let me know!

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