Desti iPad App: Personal Travel Assistant Aims to Be Social and Smart
By Karla Robinson
November 13, 2012
November 13, 2012
- When making travel plans, online search results can be hard to navigate or inappropriate. A new spinoff from SRI International that recently launched in Northern California hopes to leverage artificial intelligence and social suggestions to make mapping out trips easier and smarter.
- Currently in public beta and only available as an iPad app, travel service Desti “was built using SRI’s artificial intelligence technology, combined with natural language processing, semantic search and a travel-specific knowledge base,” GigaOM reports. “The system uses contextual clues and what it knows about a user to return relevant results, which are displayed on a very visual results page.”
- Users can type in queries — or with the latest versions of the iPad, vocally dictate — to get results with Desti’s rating and information on amenities as well as resources and helpful tips.
- “Desti is able to understand context when a user interacts with it,” the article states. “If I’m looking at a destination and ask what else is around, it pulls up results related to my last search. And if the weather is cold, it can change its results to find you something to do indoors.”
- “Like many new travel services, Desti also taps your social graph,” GigaOM continues. “So it can learn your tastes from Facebook likes and you can share your collections with others. And when you visit a place where another user has been, Desti will let you know and see what comments they’ve left.”
- The service, which has raised $1.5 million in funding, faces competition from social travel apps like TripAdvisor and Google, “which is loading up on travel services and is working on its own semantic search efforts,” the article reports.
- Although the service allows users to save a destination and share it with other users, it doesn’t yet work on smartphones so users have to email themselves to sync their research.
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