Watch: Cleartrip’s Manoj Sharma on voice technology in OTAs

Online travel agency Cleartrip is not only using technology to improve its user interface, but also leveraging emerging technologies to increase revenue growth.

The Mumbai-based company has been investing in voice recognition technologies to improve customer experience and topline growth since 2014.

“At Cleartrip, we launched a search experience using voice on a major platform, two years ago. Prior to that, as early as 2014, we had launched a voice experience on our Android platform. At that time, the technology wasn’t mature enough from a voice point of view or from an NLP (Natural Language Processing) point of view; however, the capabilities are really advancing very quickly,” Cleartrip CTO Manoj Sharma told TechCircle in an interview.

TechCircle spoke with Sharma to discuss about voice recognition technology and its implementation at the online travel agency.

Also read: How Cleartrip is betting on machine learning to take its data game further

“Voice and vernacular go hand in hand. One part is the voice technology capabilities and a lot of the industry giants have invested a lot in making this technology consumerised. At the same time, there is great advancements in vernaculars itself, in terms of voice technology or language capability available in local region,” Sharma added.

Fairly simple, yet slightly complex is how Sharma termed the basics of the technology’s implementations.

The former Quikr technology head joined the online aggregator of hotels, flights and train bookings in 2018. An electrical engineer by qualification, Sharma has over 20 years of experience in product engineering, where he has worked in startups across social media, social gaming, and ecommerce in the US and India.

Also watch: Personalisation is the last frontier for consumer internet companies: Sanjay Mohan, MakeMyTrip