Travel agents may be mostly a relic of the past, but Priceline has used AI to create a new one. Penny Voice is designed to help you book trips by conversing with you like a human. Priceline turned to OpenAI and its new Realtime API introduced this week to create Penny, leveraging GPT-4o and the technology underlying the Advanced Voice Mode for ChatGPT.
Penny Voice augments the existing Priceline AI travel assistant with the new tools from OpenAI. Natural, conversational speech with a user processed by the AI models allows Penny to understand complex requests and even anticipate what you want before you lay it out. It also has a memory for previous interactions and stated preferences to customize how it responds in future conversations. Penny Voice is starting out just on hotel reservations, and you can talk to it on the Priceline iOS app or on its website.
For travelers, Penny Voice can streamline getting a trip together. Instead of searching through websites and writing long, detailed requests, you can talk to Penny like the AI is a human. The AI will help find hotels and offer suggestions for places to eat and things to do. Priceline plans to add flights, rental cars, and vacation packages to Penny’s capabilities soon.
“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,” Priceline CEO Brett Keller said. “Our collaboration with OpenAI includes a continuous feedback loop, allowing us to rapidly innovate, enhance, and now literally bring Penny to life. We’re extremely proud of our work together and the results.”
AI Speech for All
Priceline claims Penny stands out from rival voice AI tools due to contributions from within the company and from OpenAI. Priceline brings a huge amount of information on its customers and its proprietary deals engine to the table. And thanks to OpenAI’s Realtime API, Penny can reflect your emotions, adjusting tone and phrasing to match emotional cues and mimicking human conversation better.
Priceline held auditions with more than a hundred voice actors to figure out the perfect voice to clone with AI and make for a friendly, approachable AI voice. Not just in English, either. Penny Voice can identify and answer queries in more than 120 languages. Ultimately, Penny will serve as a test for both Priceline’s AI investment and whether putting AI voices into everything will count as a win for OpenAI.
“Integrating Realtime API with Penny is a great example of how companies can use our tools to build natural conversation experiences into their applications,” OpenAI Head of API Product Olivier Godement said. “We’re” thrilled to work with Priceline to help them build an AI-powered booking experience for their customers.”
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erichs211@gmail.com (Eric Hal Schwartz)
