{"id":25242,"date":"2016-11-30T21:59:47","date_gmt":"2016-11-30T21:59:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.expedia.com\/stories\/?p=25242"},"modified":"2021-10-28T17:11:14","modified_gmt":"2021-10-28T17:11:14","slug":"a-vision-of-voice-disruption","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.expedia.com\/stories\/a-vision-of-voice-disruption\/","title":{"rendered":"A Vision of Voice Disruption"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By Tony Donohoe, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Technology at Expedia Inc.<\/p>\n<p><em>This content originally appeared on Expedia\u2019s Science of Travel Blog<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Since then, there have been advancements just about every decade to bring us to where we are now \u2013 a mobile-driven world, where you can search and book at any point, in any time, on any device. Recently, mobile has provided a huge shift across industries, driving 50% of traffic coming from mobile. But as technologies evolve, there\u2019s a desire to have personal interactions through technology. Until recently, Voice User Interface was an area considered to be artificial intelligence, but now VUIs have become more commonplace, and people are taking advantage of the value that these hands-free, eyes-free interfaces provide in many situations.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.expedia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/1.png\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" size-medium wp-image-459 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.expedia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/1-300x169.png\" alt=\"1\" width=\"300\" height=\"169\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Voice is potentially challenging for us in that there is no structured interface. We have trained Expedia users to click their mouse in a certain way or put their thumb in a certain field to get a response. We\u2019ve trained them to declare where they\u2019re going to and when. We\u2019ve trained them to search for a single product at a time. That won\u2019t be possible in voice. The consumer\u2019s expectation will be, \u201cdid I get an answer to my unstructured question?\u201d We need to build the capacity to handle unstructured voice search queries and produce structured search results. That\u2019s a great challenge and opportunity, but we\u2019re one of the few companies that will be able to do it.<\/p>\n<p>At Expedia, our mission is to revolutionize travel through the power of technology. Twenty years ago, we disrupted the travel industry by turning travel agents\u2019\u00a0screens around and allowing customers to book hotels and flights directly. This made customers\u2019 lives incredibly easy because they could take knowledge into their own hands for decision making.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.expedia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/2.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\" size-medium wp-image-460 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.expedia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/2-300x167.png\" alt=\"2\" width=\"300\" height=\"167\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Now, in order to provide natural, contextually aware conversations with our customers we know the best way is to do what we do best, test-and-learn. We began embarking on this journey with Natural Language Processing for the first time about 3 years ago with a few Expedia tasks built on text input. Today, we\u2019re excited to unveil our first foray into voice-activated search content: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.expedia\/alexa\">The Expedia skill for Amazon Alexa<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Here\u2019s a technical look at how it works:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>We used AWS Lambda, a zero-administration compute platform, which could not be more simple. It is incredibly fast to get started and scales with ease. A freshly created function is ready and able to handle tens of thousands of requests per hour with absolutely no incremental effort on your part.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.expedia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/3.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\" size-medium wp-image-461 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.expedia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/3-208x300.png\" alt=\"3\" width=\"208\" height=\"300\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Consumers recognize the value of VUIs, and want it to work in more ways. We are committed to expanding and learning within this ecosystem. This is just the beginning of our testing, we are aware that hotel and flight search results remain incredibly complex from a voice perspective. If you conduct a flight search on our desktop, we\u2019ll show you up to 1600 results. Even if we just read you the top five best options, we need to work through the most important data pieces to share with customers.<\/p>\n<p>The future has endless possibilities, and we have a lot to learn, but we are excited to continue to share our progress.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Simplicity is driving technology.\u00a0Thirty years ago, technology was defined by a disc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":25243,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1886,1786,1787,1879,1776],"tags":[],"authors":[2228],"class_list":["post-25242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-company","category-news","category-technology","category-type-of-vacation","authors-expedia-guest-author","entry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO 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