Cheapflights has launched Cheapflights Chat, an interactive bot utilising Facebook’s new Chat SDK.

The proprietary technology will enable the social network’s massive global community to use its popular Messenger platform to search for flights and other travel-related information, before linking them to the Cheapflights website where they can continue to search or move off on to the next stage of the booking process.

Cheapflights Chat can be accessed here.

Launching initially in Beta, the core flight and, for the first time, integrated hotel search functionality will be joined by a weather API, currency exchange and emoji search by the end of June.

Cheapflights has combined a whole suite of APIs with the new Facebook Messenger API and their clever AI for parsing natural language.

This way Cheapflights Chat can understand the users’ intention even when they send a longer message like “Get me a cheap flight to Paris leaving next week returning 5th of August.”

Once the message is split and keywords labelled, requests are made to different APIs to gather the required data: the Momondo Group in-house search API for flights; that of its hotel search partner for the best accommodation deals and availability data; Forecast.io’s API to see where’s hot at the moment; and Google’s Geocoding API to accurately place any location on the map and find the closest airports – all in a matter of seconds.

As well as speed, the technology has been uniquely curated to offer a human response, which embraces the Cheapflights brand personality.

Whether users are a fan of ‘dropping the f-bomb’ (or worse) or a fan of a ‘winter-is-coming—sword-fighting-like’ series, the bot has an answer for them.

If they’re a fan of another flight search competitor, well, then not so much. 

Find out more below…