With over 1 billion users posting more than 5 billion messages daily, the WhatsApp messaging application provides a powerful platform for communicating with a very large audience.
Connecting to an automated service....
How about querying global, real-time flight info directly in WhatsApp?
Of course, airports provide this info, but these are usually restricted to flights to and from the specific airport. Besides, it often means learning how to use different web pages for what is often intended to be a quick query. Why leave WhatsApp if you don't need to?
Indeed. And to address it, I built such an automated service.
Summarised in a single page
(If you want to jump straight to a screenshot showing the demo in action, here it is:)
Keeping the flight query simple
Not only did I want to access the real-time flight info directly from WhatsApp, but to avoid having to remember any arcane query terms, I wanted it to understand simple English syntax. To do this I incorporated an AI 'natural language processing' layer.
This means the automated service can understand queries like:
flight ab123
and
flight ab123 Thursday
...in the second example, the automated service can figure out what date is referred to by 'Thursday'. In fact, it can distinguish between 'Thursday' and 'next Thursday', where the latter refers to the following Thursday (ie a week later).
This short 2:19 video demonstrates the Cloud-based solution, all accessed directly from within WhatsApp.
The displayed WhatsApp messages - real-time flight information
The flight code is requested and, if it is known, the details are returned. Emphasis is used to indicate an update. For example, if the scheduled departure or arrival date/time have changed, the relevant updated message text is shown in bold.
When the user asks an incomplete question, eg accidentally omitting the flight code, he/she is prompted for it.
Branding
The returned messages can be branded, by providing links to relevant web sites. In the video, a flight leaving from London Heathrow is branded, as is one departing from Paris Charles de Gaulle. Branding is not limited to airports, but could be a variety of sources, for example airlines or retail outlets.
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