Kayak founder launches Lola, a novel hybrid travel app that uses AI as well as human agents – Tech2

Paul English, was one of the founders of Kayak, a travel services metasearch engine, that was sold to Priceline group in 2013. Paul English has just launched Lola, a novel approach at intelligent travel assistants, that incorporates machine learning but also uses a small team of human travel agents. The artificial intelligence component analyses Gmail headers on authentication, and derives information on airline, hotel and travel preferences. There is also a sign up profile that asks a series of questions from the user, aimed at personalisation of the service. All of this information is served to a cluster of human travel agents, who reply to the users in an asynchronous chat based interface.