zlacker

If you're happy "speaking to a real person" when you could automate that interaction away somehow then no, digital personal assistants probably aren't something you're going to care about.

I love talking to real people about stuff that matters to them and to me. I don't want to talk to them about booking a flight or hotel room.

>>simonw+(OP)
If hotels, or google, or travel websites wanted people to book programmatically they would have an api.Remember when Google search had an api? In the end the human is responsible for the purchase. I think when the dust settles, AI will offer a "do you want to purchase?" and then the human will press the button. Or ChatGPT or somebody controlling the last step will have that button, and services will accept it (like Instagram) because it brings business.

>>mejuto+V
The reason they don't have an API is that they want to upsell you on other stuff, and get paid to promote their partners.

There's going to be a huge fight over how that relates to AI assistants over the next few years.

>>simonw+(OP)
The nuances contained in ”booking a flight or hotel room” are plenty, it matters a lot to a lot of people. The industry will probably be very very happy to have bots do it, the amount of extra revenue they will get by taking the tricks made for humans to the next level is going to be substantial.

>>mejuto+V
This only lasts until dark patterns can be inserted that disrupt the ease of use that agents are currently providing. If I can't force the end user to watch unskippable ads or trick them into spending money on a service they don't need, what are we even doing?

>>simonw+b4
I agree fully, and wanted to add: for many of these services, like travel engine comparison sites, running the query itself costs money, so you do not want to make it to easy to search without booking.

>>simonw+(OP)
I'm not sure I've ever talked to an actual human about booking a flight or a hotel room, and I'm 40. Airlines and hotels have websites (and then there's booking.com etc of course). They were early adopters, even! Ryanair has had a website where you could book flights for 26 years, and that's a budget airline.

I would never, in a million years, trust an LLM to book a Ryanair flight. I barely trust _myself_ to book one without accidentally buying insurance or something. And booking.com is not much better. If the travel sites are not _already_ embedding adversarial prompts they will be soon. And they'll be good at it, because they've spend the last few decades practicing on humans.