Travel and expense platform Itilite has launched AI voice capabilities for both travel booking and expense reporting, which the company said is shaving time off the average booking process.
While many travel and expense platforms are focusing more on text-based chat interfaces for AI, Itilite has prioritized voice in its development, said Ashish Mehta, Itilite's product marketing lead in its founder's office. That stems in part for Itilite's clientele, which includes "a lot of people who are mostly on the ground," such as in sales or construction, he said.
"Chat-based interface only reaches travelers at a desk," Mehta said. "But corporate travel is not a desk-only category—sales teams in the field, engineers on site, drivers between stops. Voice interface is built for them."
With Itilite's voice capabilities, users can speak the basic details of their trip—saying they have a round trip between two cities on certain dates and want business class, for example—and it automatically populates the search with those parameters. If something is not clear, such as a city like Rochester or Portland that could apply to more than one state, users are prompted to specify.
On the expense side, users can verbalize the basic details of an expense to create an expense item, $10 at a Starbucks for a meal related to a certain project, for example.
Mehta said the voice feature has cut the average time for a booking query down from about 30 seconds to under 10 seconds, cutting out time users previously spent filling out the search form. The voice feature also combines air and hotel into a single query, so users do not have to separately fill out search forms for hotels, he said.
For now, the voice feature is focused on initiating the search. For the actual booking after the search, Mehta said its recommendation engine provides a list of results from which users will want to manually choose from the top three, as scrolling through options with voice would be tedious. Itilite's recommendation engine currently successfully offers the user's ultimate option at the top about 70 percent of the time, but a figure that will need to reach above 90 percent for voice to be a useful option, according to Mehta.
Down the line, Itilite is working to enable more precise search through voice. For example, a traveler could request to see flights only in which exit row seats are available, he said.
"There are many more use cases that we know will save time and effort for the users, and we are actively building it," Mehta said. "Voice is just the start and lays the foundation."
While voice is Itilite's priority, the company also realizes that chat "has its own benefits" and is working on chat interfaces "in places they are naturally suited," he added.
Voice, meanwhile, is only one of Itilite's recently added features on the expense side. It also has added an audit check feature in which finance teams can write rules in natural language—not allowing reimbursement for alcoholic beverage purchases, for example—and the platform will enforce it on all receipts. In addition, Itilite has added a feature in which users can submit a photo with multiple receipts, and the platform splits, matches and codes them via AI.