Priceline has a new AI voice assistant thanks to OpenAI
Travel agencies may be largely a relic of the past, but Priceline has used AI to create a new one. Penny Voice is designed to help you book travel by talking to you like a human. Priceline turned to OpenAI and the new Realtime API introduced this week to create Penny, leveraging GPT-4o and the technology underlying Advanced Voice Mode for ChatGPT.
Penny Voice expands the existing Priceline AI travel assistant with the new tools from OpenAI. Through natural, conversational conversations with a user, processed by the AI models, Penny can understand complex requests and even anticipate what you want before laying it out. It also has a memory for past interactions and stated preferences to tailor how it responds in future conversations. Penny Voice starts with hotel reservations only, and you can talk to it through the Priceline iOS app or on the website.
For travelers, Penny Voice can streamline trip planning. Instead of searching websites and writing long, detailed requests, you can talk to Penny as if the AI were a human. The AI helps find hotels and offers suggestions for places to eat and things to do. Priceline plans to soon add flights, rental cars and vacation packages to Penny’s options.
“At Priceline, we have always pushed technology boundaries to make travel easier. With Penny Voice, we are further redefining the way people plan and book travel,” said Brett Keller, CEO of Priceline. “Our partnership with OpenAI includes a continuous feedback loop, allowing us to quickly innovate, improve and now literally bring Penny to life. We are extremely proud of our work together and the results.”
AI speech for everyone
Priceline claims that Penny differentiates itself from competing voice AI tools thanks to contributions from within the company and from OpenAI. Priceline brings a tremendous amount of information about its customers and its proprietary deals engine to the table. And thanks to OpenAI’s Realtime API, Penny can mirror your emotions, adjusting tone and phrasing to match emotional cues and better mimic human conversations.
Priceline auditioned more than a hundred voice actors to find the perfect voice to clone with AI to create a friendly, accessible AI voice. Not just in English by the way. Penny Voice can identify and answer questions in more than 120 languages. Ultimately, Penny will serve as a test of both Priceline’s AI investment and whether bringing AI voices into anything will count as a win for OpenAI.
“The integration of Realtime API with Penny is a great example of how companies can use our tools to build natural conversational experiences into their applications,” said Olivier Godement, Head of API Product at OpenAI. “We are excited to partner with Priceline to help them build an AI-powered booking experience for their customers.”
