EDINBURGH, Scotland – Skyscanner and Skype have collaborated to build a travel search chat bot for the Skype platform.
Launched today, the travel search bot for Skype is Skyscanner’s first to offer interaction in a group chat setting. Skype users involved in a group conversation with friends or colleagues can simply add the Skyscanner bot in to the chat and interact with the bot naturally, as if it were another group member.
The Skyscanner bot for Skype offers users the chance to search for flights, either individually or as part of a group, returning live prices and route options within Skype, before providing a link where users can go to complete the booking for their trip.
Skyscanner has firmly positioned itself as an early-adopter in the travel metasearch space when it comes to innovations in bots and conversational search. Earlier this year, Skyscanner became the first travel search engine to build a voice search tool for Amazonโs Alexa voice service, and more recently launched the first travel comparison bot for Facebookโs Messenger service.
Skyscannerโs Head of Bots and Conversational Search, David Low, comments, โSkyscanner is always looking to offer our users fresh, innovative and engaging new ways to search for their travel . Chat bots offer something truly revolutionary by bringing travel search within the very platforms users are already interacting with on a frequent basis. Working with Skype on creating our bot was a natural fit for us: travel is an inherently social activity, and so it seems completely fitting that weโve worked with Skype โ the worldโs largest peer-to-peer communications platform and the first messaging platform to offer bots which can interact as part a group chat environment, to give users the ability to share the experience of finding the best flights together.โ