The week GenAI left on his trip

This week was arguably the biggest week ever for generative artificial intelligence, especially for the travel industry. Let's take a look at the three big announcements.

OpenAI

On Monday, OpenAI introduced a new AI model called GPT-4o. The event was small and fairly modest, and the updated products mostly looked like iterative improvements to previous versions. The demos were great, but we've been taught lately not to trust these demos. GPT-4o as a large-scale language model (LLM) looks like the best model to date, but it's not a huge step up from his latest GPT-4. User chat is free and via API he is 50% cheaper. It's also important that it's very fast.

Another feature they focused on was the new Voice-to-Voice agent.

The new voice agent has memory (has been in the works for a while), sounds lifelike, and has near-zero latency. It's also completely hands-free. None of these seem like huge upgrades on their own, but the overall experience is revolutionary.

You have to experience it to understand it. It's like talking to a human. The intonation is also perfect. You can have normal conversations with a natural rhythm. But it's an LLM. LLM knows everything. This is your 24/7 assistant that supports you in every aspect of your life. Your business strategy, sales prospects, problems, secrets. Or listen to some useless soccer trivia. Anything is fine. It remembers everything. Until you tell me to forget.

Expedia

The Expedia Partner Conference has become something of a technology launch conference. This week, they handed over their CEO duties to Ariane Gorin on stage.

The most important product announcement was Romie, a travel assistant/agent. The current angle is that Romy can participate in chats with his friends. Interestingly, Expedia had a human-powered version of this back in the “Local Expert” days.

With this new product, you can invite Romie to chat on Messenger, Whatsapp, or Text. Romy (no need for pronouns?) sits quietly and 'monitors' the conversation, jumping in to help at the right time and providing LLM information and some useful flight, hotel and activity options .

In fact, it's actually quite clever if you think about it. Humans converse with each other very naturally and reveal all their preferences for upcoming trips. Romy steps in when the time comes to help with inspiration, discovery, and trading.

What a perfect way to collect personalized data related to a specific trip. This is everything personalization should be.

They messed it up and said save those settings for next time. That way, you can seamlessly bring your bachelorette weekend plans and apply them to your honeymoon. I don't care. The core concept is great. Currently in beta (EG Labs) – Alternatively, you can communicate through Messages without the need for an app.

Google

It would take a month to fully examine everything Google announced on Tuesday. And then we have another month to decide what is just conceptual and what is live. Then it takes another two months to figure out which Google accounts have access to which tools with which browser logins.

That aside, Google has been leading the charge lately, along with OpenAI/Microsoft. Everything looked impressive.

Google Gemini is already leading the industry in travel planning, and we continue to talk about it. Despite using it for demos at every event, I wondered if they actually cared about their travel plans.

Travel planning solutions are an alternative to fixing space and time. Spaces need to be fixed because humans are on the move and Google Maps has such a huge advantage and probably a trillion dollar moat. Humans value time, so we have to correct time.

Therefore, creating the ideal travel planning tool is the perfect way to demonstrate mastery of both space and time in one highly relevant tool, and a 30-second demo will do just fine. Thing.

The problem for everyone involved in travel is that even if it's just a byproduct, it's likely to attract a larger portion of the funnel. But this is fine. People love paying Google.

All three companies spent a lot of time with their agents. At this time, it is “Agent is joining”. This is a great way to make things easier. The assistant participates in conversations between humans. Everyone can bring their own agent if they wish. Agents are just happy to talk to you and don't feed their egos. Humans are happy and under no threat.

In the early 2000s, most websites were colorful and noisy. Google went with a white, clean, and simple design. Ebay had a bright yellow background, but they wanted to modernize it and switch to white.

The day we changed it, all the humans (customers) screamed, so we immediately changed it back to yellow. After that, the engineers programmed it to brighten by 1% every few days, and after a few months it turned white. Effortlessly. Everyone was happy.