Shopping hasn’t made it as far as Google Assistant in Europe yet, but you can now book your European coach journey thanks to a new Google Assistant integration from FlixBus. It’s the first bus company anywhere in the world to embrace artificial intelligence and enable booking a ticket simply by speaking.
“We want to give FlixBus users the best travel experience via innovative and digital solutions. By integrating with Google Assistant, our customers can easily book the fastest or cheapest connection with the FlixBus via voice control or receive up-to-date travel information on their long-distance bus journey.”
– Daniel Krauss, Co-Founder and CIO of FlixMobility GmbH.
Using Google Assistant, FlixBus users can access information about connections, timetables and current prices simply by asking. Once the right journey is found, customers can then book their ticket with voice control. The FlixBus Action will initially launch in English, French and German. Since March 2017, the international FlixBus route network with over 250,000 daily connections has also been available in Google Maps via the Google Transit feature.
“The sooner companies take advantage of assistive marketing, the more likely they are to build that expertise. We are pleased that we have a partner with FlixBus who recognized this potential early on and with whom we can jointly shape the future of the digital assistant.”
– Malte Will, Product Partnerships, Google Assistant
The FlixBus Action is currently available through Google Assistant on Android smartphones. For customers who are not yet using Google Assistant, the app can be downloaded from the following links for iOS and Android.
Virtual Assistants for ecommerce are still in their infancy and whilst booking international coach journeys by voice is relatively niche, each time a consumer uses a virtual assistant it becomes more ingrained in their psyche and routine. In the same way that mobile ecommerce had a slow take up and then accelerated rapidly, you can expect virtual assistants to suddenly blossom and become mainstream for shopping in the very near future.
