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419 points serjester | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.434s | source
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wiradikusuma ◴[] No.43536155[source]
Booking a flight is actually task I cannot outsource to a human assistant, let alone AI. Maybe it's a third-world problem or just me being cheap, but there are heuristics involved when booking flights for a family trip or even just for myself.

Check the official website, compare pricing with aggregator, check other dates, check people's availability on cheap dates. Sometimes I only do the first step if the official price is reasonable (I travel 1-2x a month, so I have expectation "how much it should cost").

Don't get me started if I also consider which credit card to use for the points rewards.

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1. zippergz ◴[] No.43538122[source]
I have HAD a human assistant who booked flights for me. But it took them a long time to learn the nuances of my preferences enough to do it without a lot of back and forth. And even then, they still sometimes had to ask. Things like what time of day I prefer to fly based on what I had going on the day before or what I'll be doing after I land. What airlines I prefer based on which lounges I'd have access to, or what aircraft they fly. When I would opt for a connecting flight to get a better price vs. when I want nonstop regardless of cost. And on and on. Probably dozens of factors that might come into play in various combinations depending on where I'm going and why. And preferences that are hard to articulate, but make sense once understood.

With a really excellent human assistant who deeply understood my brain (at least the travel related parts of it), it was kind of nice. But even then there were times when I thought it would be easier and better to just do it myself. Maybe it's a failure of imagination, but I find it very hard to see the path from today's technology to an AI agent that I would trust enough to hand it off, and that would save enough time and hassle that I wouldn't prefer to just do it myself.

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2. sneak ◴[] No.43550265[source]
Off topic, but I’m curious: how did you go about finding an assistant that good?