Mobile and Technology

Travel search engine iXiGO.com has launched its natural language flight search tool for Facebook and Twitter.

The tool will allow Facebook and Twitter users to post a flight request on a wall or send a message to a Twitter page and receive the cheapest flight fare and details within minutes.

“We are pioneering the use of semantic search technology in online travel and have developed the capability of natural language processing,” said Rajnish Kumar, Co-Founder & CTO, iXiGO.com.

“Our objective is to enable our users to converse with our search engine just the way they would converse with a travel agent or a friend. They can do flight searches in natural language, a simpler paradigm than choosing parameters in a form on a website,” added Kumar.

How it works

The company explained: for searching flights on Facebook, a user has to go to https://www.facebook.com/iXiGOsearch and ask a simple search query in natural language on iXiGOSearch’s wall (e.g. “Mumbai to Dubai next week” or “Chennai to Singapore on 2nd July”). iXiGO will reply to the user with a comment on his/her query with details of the cheapest flight found across multiple travel sites, a link to the relevant iXiGO.com result page where the users can filter the results by time/stops/price etc. as well as a direct booking link for booking the cheapest flight within seconds on the travel site where it is available.

Similarly, on Twitter, a user has to simply tweet a message directed to the @iXiGOsearch Twitter account - http://www.twitter.com/iXiGOsearch (e.g. “@iXiGOsearch BOM to DEL tomorrow” or “@iXiGOsearch Cheapest flight from Delhi to London in June”) and iXiGOsearch will tweet back a response within a minute with details of the cheapest flight and a link to view results and book the flight.