Skyscanner, a holiday booking service has launched a new chat bot that enables users to search for flight tickets and book a vacation from the Facebook messenger.
Using the new conversation bot, users can search for a holiday inspiration and find locations that might suit their preferable boarding or departure location. In addition, the bot can search for suitable flights according to the user's preference and then redirect the interested user to Skyscanner's website for final booking confirmation and payment.
"We are really focused on this, because we think this is the precursor to voice," Filip Filipov, Skyscanner's B2B director told Mashable. "It's not necessarily an easy thing to do, because you need to guide the user experience."
Filipov further revealed that Skyscanner has also established a contact with Amazon with a proposal to bring in a few search capabilities to Alexa.
The bot has a "Don't know" feature that a user can select to activate the program to search for gataway inspiration and route the search results back to the users. The search results are based on the latest trends and cheap offers available in the market. Otherwise, the user can enter the destination, they would like to go to view the best available offers.
The bot can be located on the Facebook messenger by typing "Skyskanner" into the search field. People who do not have Facebook Messenger installed can still chat with the bot by using the browser redirect link provided by the company. The link redirects the user to the web version of Facebook's messaging platform.
This is not the first time that a company has launched a dedicated bot for its products and services. Big giants and companies, including CNN, Foursquare, KLM and Poncho, have already launched their own bots.
Facebook decided to integrate bot support with its chat messenger in April. This integration allows approved developers to access live chat APIs and toolkits, which can further be used to create programs for different companies that can be used to interact with the chat messenger users.
One such example of a dedicated store is Botlist. It allows users to search for the bots that they can interact with through the messenger app.
The following video examines Microsoft's 'Tay' chatbot: