Yatra.com Launches ‘YUVA’, a Universal Virtual Assistant

Yatra.com, the online travel portals, has taken an innovative approach to delivering a personalized experience and launched - ‘YUVA’ which stands for Yatra Universal Virtual Assistant. The unique and first-of-its-kind "Hybrid approach" allows the user to use both voice and text to communicate with YUVA and complete the booking on the go. YUVA is available on desktop, Android, IOS, Google Assistant and Facebook Messenger.

Supporting various Indian accents, YUVA enables intuitive customer interaction in a relatively human-like way, answering questions related to flight bookings and providing expertise in real time. No longer do customers need to search through content on the company’s website, instead they can now interact directly with YUVA and uncover the information they need in an instant.

The users can search and book flights, apply multiple filters, rearrange options with different sort orders and modify bookings. The user can provide the complete information in a single sentence or talk to YUVA and provide the relevant information in a form of a communication.  For example, ‘Show me refundable non-stop flights from Delhi to Mumbai fornext Sunday morning on Indigo’ or ‘Me and my wife want to go Delhi from Mumbai in business class on Christmas.’

Commenting on the new launch, Manish Amin, Co-Founder & CIO, Yatra.com said, “Yatra has been pushing the boundaries of Artificial Intelligence to deliver a convenient and enhanced booking experience for our customers.  YUVA is an amalgamation of Yatra's in-house Natural Language Processing module all connected with a proprietary backend for conversation steering.  We are delighted with the launch of YUVA at a time when the market and the customer is continuously evolving. It will change the customer experience by replacing clicks with sustained conversations and personalised interactions.”

The future versions of YUVA will feature multi-lingual support starting with Hindi followed by other important regional languages and will be assisting the customers in hotel and holiday bookings as well.