Integrated travel services company Thomas Cook (India) has announced the launch of ‘TeeCee’, an AI powered chatbot, in line with the company’s digital evolution strategy to offer a digital customer experience.
According to a report by Bain & Company and Google, India has the second-highest active internet user base globally at 390 million in 2018. The report also indicates that the share of online travel booking spends, having increased by 25 per cent in 2018, is anticipated to grow to 35 per cent in 2021.
Thomas Cook India has also marked that over 27 per cent of its overall holidays are being booked online.
The multi-use case and context-aware TeeCee is equipped with superior NLP (Natural Language Processing) capabilities for better understanding of user intent and offering appropriate services. TeeCee is built in association with Senseforth’s proprietary conversational AI platform for intelligent assistants that mimics human cognitive ability in understanding and actionising user intent.
Amit Madhan, President & Group Head – Information Technology & e-Business, Thomas Cook (India), said, “Thomas Cook India has always been at the forefront of cutting-edge digital innovation that focuses on seamless customer experience. I am hence truly excited with the launch of TeeCee, a first-of-its-kind chatbot offering customers a near human experience. Our phased roll out in this digital evolution will enable end-to-end forex transactions, which will be followed by holiday and visa service capabilities.”
Shridhar Marri, CEO, Senseforth.ai, said, “Today’s traveller expects a user friendly, real-time, consistent and an intuitive experience for their travel requirements and TeeCee is designed to address these needs. It is great working with Thomas Cook India, a leader in this space to create a virtual travel assistant that is poised to transform the way travel is serviced and fulfilled today.”
Looking at the current chatbot trends in artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing we can be sure that an automated future is just around the corner. An increase in the amount of attention, education and awareness associated with these fields is a clear indicator of this. The fields of AI, ML and NLP are all closely associated with one another. So, their collective development is imperative to achieve complete and true automation.