Pranas Kiziela is the CTO of Eddy Travels, a personal travel advisor that connects travellers with travel products and services. Eddy Travels is available in popular chat apps like Messenger, Telegram, Viber and Slack, and supports both text and voice based interaction.

We discuss the benefits of booking travel though a conversational interface, and the big voice-AI opportunities in the travel space right now. We tackle some of the major design considerations faced during the product build, including the limitations of the big chatbot platforms, the different challenges of working with voice and text, and how to incorporate a bot into a text conversation between two humans.

We also spend some time discussing the technical aspects, including the story of why Eddy Travels started with DialogFlow but later migrated to RASA NLU. We cover the many advantages of using an open-source framework, specifically much greater control over training the NLU models, unit testing and source control, and model management capabilities. It’s a wide ranging conversation that has something for everyone, and will make you want to book your next holiday!