Real-world Conversational AI for Hotel Bookings
This addresses the need for efficient customer service in the travel industry, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of automating hotel bookings through a conversational AI system, achieving deployment at commercial scale with tens of thousands of daily searches.
In this paper, we present a real-world conversational AI system to search for and book hotels through text messaging. Our architecture consists of a frame-based dialogue management system, which calls machine learning models for intent classification, named entity recognition, and information retrieval subtasks. Our chatbot has been deployed on a commercial scale, handling tens of thousands of hotel searches every day. We describe the various opportunities and challenges of developing a chatbot in the travel industry.