Priceline and OpenAI are aiming to make travel booking as “simple as having a conversation.” The two companies have worked together to update Priceline’s generative artificial intelligence chatbot Penny with OpenAI’s new Voice Engine, creating voice-to-voice interactions between travelers and the chatbot.
“At Priceline, we’ve always pushed technological boundaries to make travel easier. With Penny Voice, we’re further redefining how people plan and book travel,” said Brett Keller, CEO of Priceline.
Priceline is one of the first brands to use OpenAI’s GPT-4o-powered Realtime API to enable the voice capabilities in its chatbot. OpenAI announced its public beta of Realtime API on Tuesday, giving paid developers the chance to build speech-to-speech interactions using a number of preset voices.
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For now, the voice interaction is available for queries about hotels and destinations, but Priceline said it will be expanded to flights, car rentals and vacation packages soon.
Penny will be able to “hear” and understand user questions, predict needs based on historical interactions and respond in real-time – in a voice it selected after auditioning more than 100 voice actors.
In the coming months, Priceline said it will enhance the chatbot’s capabilities, for example so it can understand a customer’s tone and respond appropriately and also so it can understand diverse accents and speech patterns in more than 120 languages.
“Integrating Realtime API with Penny is a great example of how companies can use our tools to build natural conversation experiences into their applications,” said Olivier Godement, head of API product at OpenAI. “We’re thrilled to work with Priceline to help them build an AI-powered booking experience for their customers.”
Priceline initially launched Penny as part of a suite of “Trip Intelligence” tools in June 2023, built on technology from OpenAI and Google. In February, Priceline updated the suite using OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.
