Meet the new girl Jinny

By Torsten Brose | Business Development Director | Magenta Technology

So we have new girl called Jinny, who joined us recently and helps book and manage the requests we get for taxis. She’s very efficient, never gets it wrong and is even great at chatting with people while taking the bookings.

Some of the guys have tried it on a bit with her, but she’s ever the professional and never favours anyone – she’s pretty much the perfect booker. I would go so far as to say that Jinny has revolutionised the way we can take taxi bookings and is generally very popular with our customers.

OK, I guess you’re wondering where on earth we managed to find such a perfect employee. Well, the truth is, we invented her … not in a weird science way, I hasten to add, but we simply designed the optimum profile for a taxi booker and programmed it.

Jinny is, in fact, a “bot” who responds to questions through any text and messenger medium which allows bookings to be made from Facebook and other popular messenger apps. Simple stuff like where you are and where you’re going is handled through geo location or postcode lookup, just like a regular app; you can then choose time and vehicle, and of course get confirmations and updates.

Where it starts to be really fun is in programming responses to likely questions, such as:

“What are you up to, Jinny?”
“Want to come for a drink?”
“What do you think of Donald Trump?”

Effectively, you can anticipate variations on most themes and quite quickly realise what appears to be a normal conversation with a taxi booker. By the way, if you’re wondering, she won’t go for a drink with you and she thinks Donald Trump is “a bit scary”.

We took this to the recent QSI awards and tried it out with great success, I’m still not sure that everyone knew Jinny wasn’t real.

On a more serious note, if you want to meet Jinny or hear about how Echo is changing perceptions and processes in the taxi industry, I would love to hear from you.

Torsten Brose | torsten.brose@magenta-technology.com

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