Launch: Search Indian Railways trains via chat Hrush
At Cleartrip, we believe we took the train search experience a giant leap forward when we launched search and booking for Indian Railways trains. As a company dedicated to making travel simple, easing the planning, searching and booking process for trains is core to our mission. Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve made things even easier–you can now check train schedules and availability using basic Internet chat.
Using the chat based search is fairly simple. To get started, you just send a message with your search query–make sure you specify at least your origin, destination and date of travel; in addition, you can also specify your class of travel. Don’t worry too much about the syntax, if it needs more information, it will ask you for what it needs. Here’s an example search:
Mumbai to goa 20 apr 2ac
In response, you’ll get a message with a list of trains for your search and availability status for each train.
To recheck availability for a train you like, just send a message with “avail ” followed by the train number, e.g.:
avail 6345
In response, you’ll get availability status for upto 6 days.
If you like what you see and want to book, then just type “book ” followed by the train number and date you want to book for, e.g.:
book 6345 22 apr
In addition to being our first automated chat based search, this also marks our first foray into natural language search for travel. So, do keep in mind that this ‘Trains chat bot’ is an experimental product of Cleartrip Research and may behave unexpectedly as computers often do. Also, we’re not completely thrilled with the display formats and messages yet, so those might be changing frequently over the next few days.
That said, we look forward to your feedback and we hope you love the simplicity. Give it a whirl, search trains via chat today.
Note: Currently, train search via chat is available for all Jabber compatible chat clients, including Google Talk, GMail, iChat and many more. A comprehensive list of Jabber clients is available here.
Sup dawg, we heard u liked trains, so we put a bot in ur bots so u can serch while u talk.
Hrush, yet again Cleartrip is innovating in a space that several have discarded as too crowded with me-too players. I suppose this comes with technology being a core function within your company as opposed to be being outsourced (which many of your competitors do).
So what are you at heart – a technology company or a travel agency?
Train search in plain English – that’s pretty powerful. Kudos for bringing it this far!
You guys never cease to amaze me. I tried it and its working wonderfully. I felt like one of those snobs sitting behind the railway booking counters. Now i can tell them that even i can do the same thing which they do.
Btw why not air search like this? Is there any restriction?
I’m wondering if i could type the same search query on google to get results from you. Will that day come? I dont know if its possible.
Great work
We need clear trip bot for flights too!!
amazing tool… thnx cleartrip.. plz launch the service for flights and hotels as well
Umesh, Venkatesh & Robin–no restriction on flights, we’ll see how this goes and then take a call on how it should evolve. Early responses are extremely encouraging.
Whether Google can provide results from us is up to Google, drop them a note
Dhruv–at heart we’re a company that believes in making the best online travel products possible and that’s a blend of design, technology, & travel.
We don’t believe in outsourcing any of our core functions – where’s the fun in that?
Very, very impressive!
Oh, I am just loving the fact that I can know train availability anytime anywhere using Blackberry + Google Talk + Plain English + Cleartrip
Amaaaazing work … .this is called INNOVATION !
Wow!
This is absolutely cool stuff. Congrats.
(One suggestion here – it’d be really cool to have a ‘All Classes’ option while searching for train tickets similar to ‘All Stations’)
I first noticed Cleartrip when you guys started offering train bookings. Your interface and experience was a refreshing contrast from the crappy irctc site
And now with this IM bot, you have convinced me that it wasn’t a one off thing.
There’s a difference between ‘Customer Satisfaction’ and ‘Customer Delight’ and you clearly seem to understand that. Keep it up. You guys deserve at least a blog post on my blog
More Wow! You guys actually exposed yourselves as web services. I have been waiting for so long for this to start happening in India. If I’m not wrong, you are the first ones to do this in India, right? This is trend-setting. Kudos!
?
P.S.
Where’s the link to your career page
Tushar: Cleartrip fired half of its staff a few months back. What makes you think that they will have a "Career" page? (They never had any, AFAIK).
Coward–we did lay off some staff, nowhere near half as you think. Obviously you’re well informed, so you must be aware of the worldwide economic crisis?
Coward
A few months back a Lehman fired all their staff
Hrush: Yeah, I can understand the motivation behind the firings. I didn’t try to indicate that it’s something wrong. I apologise if my comment came across as such
Piyush: That was quite funny, IMHO
Hi
Why does the chat bot appear offline to me . Am i doing something wrong here.
hi,
I tried but It doesn’t work. I always used to find out train availability in http://www.indiantrains.org. Its is very easy check with my train status.