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Самолет S7
Авиабилеты S7
S7 Airlines logo

Skill for Alice and a chat bot that picks up a air ticket

Skill presentation at Yet another Conference 2018 by Yandex

01/

Who is the customer?

S7 Airlines

The largest private airline in Russia.
02/

Tasks that we were solving

Create a chatbot
for booking tickets for S7 flights on Facebook.
Create a similar skill for the Yandex.Alice voice assistant.
03/

Problems that we have faced

Lack of tools
Decision
No purchase option directly in Alice
Decision
Impatient Alice
Facebook requirements
Decision
When we were making a skill
for Alice,the Yandex.Dialogs platform for third-party developers was just being created
We actively cooperated
with the developers of "Yandex", this allowed us to remove most
of the problems
There was no purchase functionality in Alice
To complete the purchase, we sent the user to the site. The payment option in Alice is currently in beta testing.
The S7 booking system took triple the time Alice was willing to wait
We made a service that made the response faster. Our bot asked a clarifying question and at the same time searched for suitable flights to API S7.
To display Facebook ticket links, a new pop-up messages design was needed
Developed your own card design
Decision
04/

Additional functions

Checking flight status
Tips if the user is uncertain about the direction
Answers to commonly asked questions

System concept

Alice processes a natural language question: «The cheapest ticket from Moscow to London for tomorrow»
05/

Scheme

Simple booking

Book
via Alice

Book via chat-bot

Go to the website, select depatrute and arival points, travel dates, choose optimal transfer time and etc.
Tell Alice: "Order me tickets from Moscow to San Francisco at the end of the summer economy-class no more than 60 thousand rubles and without transfers."
Text in Facebook "I want to buy a ticket from Moscow to Kazan for tomorrow". Chat-bot will send the links to flights on the S7 website.
06/

Development process

Preparatory stage
Step 1
Step 2
Processing data on typical requests of S7 clients
Scripting Alice's dialogues with users
The main stage
Step 3
Step 4
Development and testing of the chatbot on Facebook
Integrating
the chatbot
with Alice's API
Step 5
Testing and launching the skill
07/

How the skill for Alice works

User says:
«Order me tickets from Moscow to San Francisco at the end of the summer economy-class no more than 60 thousand rubles and without transfers.»
Bot reacts
Converts speech to text.
Extracts the necessary information from the text
Enters flight details on the website.
Offers different options to the user.
The user follows the link from the dialogue with Alice to the site and pays for the tickets
08/

Demonstration of the skill

Навык помогает выбрать билет на самолет
09/

Project team

S7 Airlines logo
Project developer
Developer
Project manager
Anton Kapridov
Roman Doronin
Sergey Verentsov

Interesting facts

We were among the first third-party developers to create a skill for Alice.

Yandex introduced the new S7 skill at its main technology conference Yet Another Conference in 2018.
10/

Technologies

Just AI

Zendesk

Platform for creating chat bots and voice assistants
Platform for creating customer support services
11/

What we have learned

Self created platform is more efficient
How to create skills for Alice and not only
Since making your own service is better than adapting to others, we created zDialog for creating chat bots and OneDash analytics.
S7 launched EORA projects using natural language processing technologies
Read about Dialog Systems
Other projects with Alice
12/

Our work was covered by mass media

S7 logo
АвиаПОРТ лого
vc.ru лого
«S7 Airlines taught voice assistant Alice to select air tickets»
«S7 Airlines taught voice assistant Alice to select air tickets»
Where did «Alice» go: a brief overview of the «smart» speaker market in Russia and worldwide
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