If you’ve ever used an AI assistant like Amazon’s Alexa or Google Assistant, you’ll know that they have many skills that can help you throughout your daily life. Often these skills are just novelties or bits of fun, like calling Santa Claus in his workshop, but they can also be useful and practical like making your coffee in the morning, cooking your lunch, or setting reminders for your schedule. Rather impressively, Google Assistant has developed a new skill that allows it to see into the future and give you useful information when you’re about to embark on a trip or vacation.
Google Assistant can let you know with 85% accuracy if your flight will be delayed
The major advantage that Google Assistant has over other AI assistants is that it can call on data from across all of Google’s products to help provide you with the information you need when you need it. Assistant can dip into your Gmail inbox and bring back the flight times from the booking you made a few months ago as if it always had the information on hand anyway.
In a recent blog post, Google announced that soon Assistant will be able to access data from another Google product that will broaden this skill. Google Flights has been publishing flight statuses for a while, and this historical flight data allows Google to make predictions about whether flights will be delayed with an astonishing 85% level of accuracy.
Soon, data from Google Flights will be available to Google Assistant, which means you’ll soon be able to holler, “Hey Google, is my flight on time?” or “Hey Google, what’s the status of the American Airlines flight from Philadelphia to Denver?” to get up-to-date information about your flight status.
As well as providing information on flight statuses when we ask for it, Google Assistant will also start proactively updating us. If the Google Flight data indicates that there is a high likelihood your flight will be delayed, Assistant will ping you a notification telling you so, before you even ask for it. This approach puts Google Assistant ahead of Apple and even the airlines themselves, which will only send you a notification once the flight delay has been confirmed.
As we push further into the new year, we move into the most popular time of the year for booking vacations. With trips supposed to be relaxing and stress relieving, it is good to know that our virtual assistants will be working away in the background to keep us up to date about potentially stressful occurrences. Google Assistants flight delay predictions will keep us one step ahead of the game when we’re trying to relax. The big question will be, however, if Google says it thinks your flight will be delayed, will you risk staying at home on an 85% certainty?
