🔖 Introduction
About the project
The AI-powered assistant is designed to help travelers effortlessly explore the beauty of Sri Lanka. Whether you're looking for breathtaking destinations, local travel tips, or the best food spots, this chatbot has got you covered!
🤔 Problem space
Problems to Solve/Requirements to Create
Real-time Travel Assistance
Problem: Tourists often struggle to find up-to-date information on weather, traffic, and events.
Requirement: Integrate real-time data APIs (e.g., weather, traffic, flight status) to provide accurate, live updates to users, helping them make informed decisions during their travels.
👉 [Problem/Requirement] Example
Extended Problem Statement:
In the current version of the Sri Lanka AI Travel Chatbot, users often input time-sensitive activities such as flights, hotel check-ins, and events into their itineraries. However, the system lacks a feature that allows users to sort these entries by date. This makes it difficult for users to quickly view and adjust their schedules, especially when they need to make last-minute changes or when they are trying to optimize their travel day. The absence of an intuitive sorting feature causes frustration, as users must manually search through their list of activities to find the correct order.
Current solution
Currently, users manually scroll through their itinerary to find events, activities, or travel details that are scheduled for a particular date. While the chatbot can display all the activities in a simple list format, there is no automated way to group or order them chronologically. This leaves users struggling to piece together a coherent travel timeline, making it harder to plan and adjust travel plans promptly.
To solve this problem, users currently rely on external tools or apps to manually sort their time entries or use basic reminders in the chatbot, which isn’t a seamless solution. Some users even resort to writing down their schedules on paper to ensure they keep track of important dates.
How do we know it is a problem
User Feedback:
Direct User Complaints: Multiple users have mentioned during interactions with the Sri Lanka AI Travel Chatbot that they struggle to view their activities in chronological order. Users expressed frustration when they had to manually search for specific dates or activities, especially when managing a busy travel schedule.
Survey Responses: A recent user survey indicated that 72% of respondents expressed interest in a feature to sort their travel activities by date. Many users mentioned that it would help them optimize their trips and prevent the stress of sorting through their itineraries manually.
Usage Metrics:
Increased Bounce Rate: Data from the app's analytics show that users are exiting the itinerary section of the chatbot quicker than expected, with an increase in bounce rates in that specific part of the app. This suggests that users are finding it difficult to interact with the itinerary, possibly due to the lack of sorting functionality.
Repeated Queries: There has been a noticeable increase in the number of repeated queries related to itinerary organization. Users often ask the chatbot for help with "sorting their schedule" or "finding specific activities by date." This indicates that users are not able to accomplish these tasks on their own, resulting in them needing to ask for assistance repeatedly.
Goals
Company objective 🎯
💡 Our goal is to create an advanced AI-powered Travel Chatbot for Sri Lanka, leveraging React and the Gemini API to enhance
Project goals
💡 Our project aims to align with the broader company objective by achieving the following:
- Develop an intuitive user interface: Implement a modern, user-friendly UI using React and Tailwind CSS to ensure seamless interactions.
- Integrate AI for intelligent recommendations: Utilize Gemini API to provide real-time travel suggestions, itinerary planning, and FAQs.
- Enable real-time communication: Implement a chat-based interface that offers immediate responses and assistance.
User Stories
User Type: Tourist
Description: A traveler visiting Sri Lanka who wants personalized travel recommendations and real-time assistance.
Goals:
Discover tourist attractions, hotels, and restaurants.
Get AI-powered itinerary suggestions.
Receive real-time weather and transport updates.
Needs:
A chatbot that understands natural language queries.
Integration with Google Maps for location-based assistance.
Filtering options for budget, interests, and travel dates.
Other Characteristics:
User Type: Local Business Owner
Description: A hotel, restaurant, or travel agency owner who wants to attract more tourists through the AI chatbot.
Goals:
List their services in the chatbot's recommendation system.
Engage with potential customers via chatbot interactions.
Offer promotions and deals to travelers.
Needs:
A feature to register and update their business details.
AI-driven insights on tourist preferences.
Integration with booking platforms.
Other Characteristics:
User Type: Admin
Description: A system administrator who manages the chatbot’s functionality, user interactions, and data analytics.
Goals:
Monitor chatbot performance and user engagement.
Manage content updates and integrations.
Ensure smooth API connections (Gemini AI, Google Maps, etc.).
Needs:
A dashboard to track chatbot analytics and user queries.
Tools to update chatbot responses and add new features.
Secure access control for managing chatbot services.
Other Characteristics:
🌟 Design space
UI Design
High-fidelity design
Development Phase
Technology Stack Selection
1. Frontend - React.js
Why React.js?
Component-Based Architecture: Enables reusable UI components, making development modular and scalable.
Virtual DOM: Enhances performance by updating only the necessary parts of the UI.
Rich Ecosystem: Strong community support and a vast collection of third-party libraries.
Responsive & Interactive UI: Ensures smooth user experience across devices
2. AI Integration - Gemini API
Why Gemini API?
Natural Language Understanding (NLU): Accurately processes user queries for personalized responses.
Context Awareness: Understands conversations for better recommendations.
Multilingual Support: Assists both local and international travelers.
High-Level Architecture Diagram
💡 This project follows a cloud-based architecture integrating AI, databases, and external APIs.
System Flow:
User Interaction: The chatbot receives user queries via the React frontend.
AI Processing: Gemini API processes the request and returns a response.
Key Features of the Software
1. AI-Powered Travel Assistant
Feature 1 — AI-Powered Travel Assistance
AI Model Selection & Integration (Gemini API)
Challenges Faced and Solutions
💡 Write down the challenges you faced and how you solved
Problem 1: Ensuring Multi-Language Support
Challenge:
Supporting Sinhala, Tamil, and English required accurate translations while maintaining conversational context.
Solution:
Used Gemini API’s multilingual NLP to handle seamless translations dynamically.
Implemented a language detection module to auto-switch between languages based on user input.
Provided manual language selection for better user control.
Future Vision / Next Steps
Long-Term Vision
The Sri Lanka AI Travel Chatbot aims to become the go-to digital travel assistant for both locals and tourists by continuously improving AI capabilities, UI, and real-time data integrations.
Planned Enhancements for Future Versions
📌 V.2 - AI & Personalization Improvements
Enhancing AI Context Retention: Improve the chatbot’s ability to remember past interactions for better continuity.
Personalized Travel Itineraries: Allow users to input preferences (budget, time, interests) to generate tailored trip plans.
AI-powered Smart Recommendations: Use machine learning to refine travel suggestions based on user behavior.
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