Phillip Butler of Argophilia.com recently shared his opinions regarding semantic search as it relates to the travel industry, particularly with regard to Desti, a new travel search startup. Butler writes, “The other day Tnooz reported on Expedia testing their own variant of natural language search, now available in a Powerset-like sandbox called YourVisit. In that article Kevin May aptly points to other supposed ‘natural language search’ developments in travel, namely Evature and Hopper. The problem with this is, these systems are not AI nor true semantic search, in fact ‘natural language search’ is a buzz term actually used by Powerset to differentiate from hakia and Google semantic search experiments.” Read more

Ryan Kim of GigaOM recently reported that SRI International is putting out their own Siri-like personal travel assistant, Desti. He writes, “Apple’s Siri works pretty well as a personal assistant but it’s not equipped to be your virtual travel guide. But Desti which, like Siri, is a spin out from SRI International, is launching today in public beta and is looking to take on that job for consumers. Desti, which is debuting as an iPad app, offers users the ability to pose travel questions and get back specific recommendations on hotels, restaurants and events. The service, which is limited to Northern California for now, was built using SRI’s artificial intelligence technology, combined with natural language processing, semantic search and a travel-specific knowledge base. The system uses contextual clues and what it knows about a user to return relevant results, which are displayed on a very visual results page.” Read more

Nadav Gur, founder and CEO of Desti, recently shared his insights on moving beyond search in the age of Siri. Gur writes, “Since the launch of Siri on the iPhone 4S last year, the media has been abuzz with the potential implications of what’s next – from Google’s Eric Schmidt commenting that Siri poses a great threat to Google, to countless articles by VCs and thought leaders. Has artificial intelligence finally come of age? And is it ready for broader applications in industries ranging from travel to finance? Are we destined to grapple with fast-following Siri clone after Siri clone, or will the category evolve?” Read more