Like a Virgin Airways bot, planning for the very first time

Non-human travel agents are here. Virgin Atlantic earlier this month installed an AI travel agent on its website, calling the web-bound chatbot "the future of travel planning." 

The project, dubbed Virgin Atlantic Concierge, was implemented by Tomoro, a UK-based AI design consultancy, in partnership with OpenAI.

The Concierge service supports typed or spoken input, assuming the Virgin Atlantic site visitor has granted permission for device microphone activation. The bot, which can respond using simulated speech as well as text, takes longer processing spoken input than typed input, presumably dbecause it has to process captured audio using a speech-to-text model.

Sam Netherwood, co-founder and director of Tomoro, spoke to The Register about the development of Concierge and the project's goals.

"Initially, Virgin engaged us," Netherwood said. "We partner quite closely with OpenAI. Virgin also had already entered into an agreement with OpenAI. And so that's how it came together ...