Post by Allyne Zhang

I’m happy to share that my team has come in 2nd out of 287 teams in the 9th edition of the Singapore Airlines AppChallenge, a global hackathon for aviation and travel! ✈️ Over a span of 2 months, we tackled Scoot’s challenge of enhancing the end-to-end experience and effectiveness of airfares & ancillaries sales through social media. Essentially, our goal was to inspire customers to respond to advertisements and transition into successful conversions. Our solution, ScootSpark, is a social media chatbot powered by genAI 🤖 designed to empower spontaneous customers to make quick yet well-informed travel purchases. Here are its key features:  1️⃣ Instant Information: Receive fast, factual, and comprehensive support for any queries about Scoot, from their advertisements to fares and policies.  2️⃣ Personalized Journey: Create unique itineraries containing flight and attraction tickets from the Scoot Marketplace, tailored to your specific preferences, budget, and requests.  3️⃣ Easy Checkout: Purchase flight and ancillary tickets ranging from in-flight services to attractions from the Scoot Marketplace all at once within the same platform. Our solution’s prototype was built using FastAPI, LangChain, Microsoft Guidance, Redis, and ChromaDB, utilizing Telegram’s interface. Being responsible for the AI development, a significant takeaway was learning how to mitigate genAI’s biggest challenge: hallucinations. This journey of honing skills and exploration shared parallels with my internship at Deloitte, and it was fascinating to witness its dividends in this context. Lastly, a big shout out to my teammates Thaddeus Lee, Wei Lun Teo, Loh Ken Ming, (and our honorary member Bryan Tan) for the great teamwork and fun journey 🫡. I'd also like to express my gratitude to Audrey from AMEX, Sino from TCS, and Gaby from KrisLab for their valuable mentorship. Congratulations to all the other teams on their outstanding work as well! 🥳