askbwi_bot

Inspiration

One travel chatbot window for all the answers Travel apps can be useful for tourists - or they can be seen as bloatware. The most common complaint that travelers have with these apps is that each one of them focuses on a different niche. For example, one app provides information on tourist attractions in a particular city. Another offers real-time weather updates. Yet another manages flights and hotel bookings. For the average tourist, these can add up to a significant amount of storage space on their phone. Further, many of them become redundant after one trip and need to be replaced with a different app.

Travel chatbots offer a cleaner alternative. Online chatbots for websites and messaging apps have one thing in common - they don't create bloatware on your device. Instead, they use existing platforms like browsers or messenger apps that almost everyone has on their phone. As such, they make it possible for travelers to receive notifications, updates and promotional offers, without downloading separate apps for each of the services they'll be using during their trip.

All one needs to do is ask When it comes to searching for information or assistance, nothing beats the simplicity of asking a simple question, in your own words, and receiving the exact answer you're seeking. This is where even the best travel websites and smartphone apps tend to fall short. They may offer attractive holiday packages and room tariffs, or extremely detailed information about sightseeing destinations and city services. But if users have to navigate through multiple layers of information to get to what they're looking for, they might end up abandoning the process midway.

Conversations with travel chatbots are refreshingly different. Someone interested in exploring a new city can just head to the chat window and ask a question like, "What are the 10 best things to do in ?"

Even typing keywords like "restaurants", "museums", "shopping" or "hiking" will produce useful and relevant information about places they can go to. The best chatbots for tourism services also integrate features like directions and guest reviews with their suggestions, helping tourists make the right choices based on their schedule, budget, and other preferences.

Travel chatbots get smarter with time Webpages and app menus require some getting used to. Users need to familiarize themselves with the options available on them, and after a few visits, they might be able to complete their hotel searches and flight bookings faster. But travel chatbots take the game to a whole new level.

Instead of asking users to get to know the tourism service better, AI bots work the other way round. They use machine learning to identify commonly used phraseology and search terms and actually get more attuned to traveler's preferences over time. Besides, chat scripts can always be updated based on records of prior conversations with users. Travel chatbot development is thus a dynamic process; over the course of their interactions with travelers, the bots get smarter and allow the tourism business to offer improved services and user experiences.

Travel chatbots help tourism services retain customers Websites and apps are static in the sense that they don't adapt to visitor's needs in real time. If a tourist is unable to find the information they need on a travel app, for example, they'll close it and move on to a different source of information. But if they're in conversation with a chatbot, they can either get the details from the bot itself or get connected to a staff member who is better equipped to answer their questions.

Chatbots and human employees of a travel-related service can thus work together to offer tourists a well-rounded experience. They're also able to retain a higher number of customers due to the proactive customer support that they can offer when they team up in this manner.

What it does

Askbwi provides useful tips and relevant information to explore and discover Wonderful Banyuwangi with an Artifical Intelligent powered chatting machine experience. Users simply need to open Facebook Messenger or Telegram and start asking simple questions, in their own words, and receive the exact answers they are looking for. For users who have BRI account can book & pay a transport JEEP/MPV by using BRIVA.

How we built it

We use the Google cloud platform for the server and AI/machine learning technologies.
We use Python as a backend process and for Interfaces, we use instant messaging and cloud-based platforms such as Facebook Messenger & Telegram.
We built the main API using google sheets so we could keep it simple and easily update the data.
We will use BRIVA (BRI Virtual account) developers API to create virtual account payment for booking feature.

Challenges we ran into

Our challenge is about data. It's about how we connect all of the data or information about Banyuwangi tourism from many sources on the internet, and also from offline resources. So we can improve the bot intelligence in order to provide information that is relevant to users.

What we learned

We learned that most of the foreign tourist we interviewed still have difficulties to find information about Banyuwangi tourism. Most information is on the Indonesian language, and due to the language barrier, they fail to make a deal with tour & transportation agents. Based on that information, we believe this AI chatbot project can solve such problem.

What's next for Askbwi

We hope this project can be truly integrated into the part of Banyuwangi tourism government, so we can work together for future improvement. From that, we also hope that we can easily work with local SMME (UMKM) that focus on tourism to provide various information that supports digital tourism. For examples like tour & transportation booking, traditional souvenirs purchases, and other things that involved local people.

Some of the future improvement, based on our research from tourists who have traveled to Banyuwangi, we want to integrate several features to this project, such as:

Live chat with askbwi_bot directly on the website not only on instant messaging.
Support Indonesia language and other languages in the future.
Adding Bot Integrations on LINE messaging and WhatsApp.
Booking entrance ticket, tour, transport, and accommodation with ease and pay by credit card, PayPal, virtual account and all payment method provided by Midtrans. Our goal in this feature is to support the cashless society to make the payment more easy for users especially foreigner people who are traveling to Banyuwangi.