Making Transactions more effective with Conversation

There are a few things that differentiate how humans evolved compared to the other animals. One of the first things that Humans learnt were to walk and to talk. Walking led to movement, it led us to explore more efficient ways of movement and that’s how travel evolved. Similarly talking led to conversations which led to transactions & commerce, which helped build Economics around civilisations.

Conversation is the most basic, original means for a transaction. But as civilisations evolved, we explored new ways to make transactions through indirect conversations and other tools — paper, organisations & most importantly Information Technology. It helped us scale transactions beyond the limits and capabilities of the human mind. Almost all sorts of transactions started to adopt IT - Banks, Travel, Hospitality, shopping etc. The IT slowly evolved into self-serve technology. Anyone with an internet connection could transact, buy or sell anything anywhere in the world. We built on interfaces and experiences and thousands of customisation options; simplified a lot of things and complicated some more. We also made conversation complicated with systems like IVRS.

But conversation still remained a preferred way for transaction. It’s always easy to ask someone what you want than going through multiple filters and sorting through lists. Imagine looking for a hotel near the city centre, with an indoor pool, gym and rooms with balconies. You might find it but it’s not a very easy process. But that’s what you want. And as different is every person, so are their needs. Isn’t technology supposed to help you find what you want in a comfortable way? How can we enable better customisation? or can’t we just talk to the machine, ask what we want!

This is exactly what we’re doing at Waylo — Enabling conversations for booking hotels. The goal is to make travel planning faster and easier, to help the customer get what they want; as quickly and easily as possible. . You talk to the machine, ask what you want and the machine will give you the exact option. No filters, no sorting, no looking through endless lists.

Here’s how Waylo’s chatbot makes travel booking better

1. Simple
   No installs, no sign ups required. Waylo works directly from the messenger app; You don’t need to install a new app or create an account.
2. Easier
   You don’t need to learn the interface. It’s pretty simple and like talking to a friend. If you feel stuck, you can type in ‘help’ or ‘support’ and an agent will help you. Ask what you want and you shall get it.
3. Faster
   It’s faster coz it reduces the time you would spend scrolling or moving the mouse pointer all around the computer screen. And because it’s texting, it can be a parallel process; you could be doing something else while you do this.

But beyond the conversation, here’s the biggest advantage of using Waylo: Price. Waylo predicts the price drops of future and lets you book hotels at that rate today.

Waylo uses Artificial Intelligence in two ways. One, for the chatbot — using NLP to process user input and generate messages, hotel cards and payment link. Two, for the price prediction — using machine learning to learn price drop patterns and effectively predict the lowest prices.

The price prediction can help you save lots of money depending on the hotel, city and dates. Earlier this year, one user saved 78% on their hotel. That’s like Five nights at the rate of One!

You can start with the messenger bot here or try the web app and look for a specific hotel in a city here.

Our customers love the chatbot. Read the reviews here.

Let us know what you think about the app and also your thoughts on how messaging as a medium of conversation can be the future of transaction and commerce.

If you like this, clap as much as you can and share the post!