Introducing Ask Skift, the AI Chatbot for Your Travel Questions
25.08.2023 - 13:35
/ skift.com
/ Rafat Ali
Today, we are very excited to announce Ask Skift, the AI chatbot answers engine specializing in the travel industry, here to be of service on your daily work queries.
What does it do?
Go ahead, ask away any question, such as “How is Airbnb planning to leverage AI?” Or “Who is the new CEO of IHG?”. Or “Who are the owners of Ace Hotel?” Or, “Write me a short essay on the state of overtourism post-covid.”
How does it source the answers?
We have “trained” Ask Skift on all the sum totality of Skift archives over the last 11 years, including daily stories, research reports, all of our clients’ trends reports, our specialized products – Airline Weekly, Daily Lodging Report, and Skift Meetings – and all the U.S. public travel companies’ financial SEC annual and quarterly reports. As soon as a new story or report is published, it goes straight into Ask Skift.
And this is just the start: we will continue to train it on other specialized travel industry content and data in coming weeks in order to improve the answers and expand the universe of queries it can tackle.
What tech is it built on?
For now we have built this on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 deep learning artificial intelligence algorithm (a logic-learning machine, or LLMin short). We would really like to use GPT-4, which gives exponentially better answers (we know, we have been testing internally on both versions) but for now it is cost-prohibitive. We expect prices to come down later this year and will upgrade to it.
* One word of warning: for now it won’t be able to answer all your questions, mostly because there is more training and fine-tuning of the GPT LLM to come, more content to train it on, and most importantly, moving it to the more advanced GPT-4 version. We are fairly certain, though, it will not creep anyone out as some other AI bots have done.
Why launch this when it isn’t fully ready?
As with any generative AI foundational models today, we are in the early experimental phase of the algorithms and its efficacy. We believe launching a product now will help us learn all its use cases, make it more accurate, give us ideas on new features to build in, and frankly, figure out how to stay ahead of everyone else in the industry.
One thing we have learned since starting Skift: the biggest fear of any new launch is the fear of being judged, and we are taking away that fear by…launching this and taking any and every critical feedback on it.
Where can you find Ask Skift chatbot?
You will find the Ask Skift bot on all Skift.com pages in the bottom right-hand corner. The design is a nod to the original Skift luggage tag logo. Also, you can always go to Skift.ai where this chatbot has a “homepage” and will be the future home of other AI tools