India Is Where the Voice-First Travel App Gets Built

Earlier this month, Ixigo — India’s leading OTA for mass-market travelers, the train and bus crowd — relaunched its entire app under a new identity called Ixigo Next, with a voice-native AI assistant named Tara at the center of the interface, handling queries in English, Hindi, and the code-mixed Hinglish that is how most Indians actually talk to their phones. Co-CEO Rajnish Kumar told us that the rebuild was a “NewCo inside OldCo,” a separate team rebuilding from the AI layer up.

Co-founder Aloke Bajpai’s LinkedIn post called it “a global first” and “a Peace of Mind App for travellers,” and said the demo video “doesn’t even demonstrate 1% of what we can do for you,” which is the kind of founder language that makes it harder to see what is, underneath the theatrics, a more interesting product bet than anything Booking or Expedia shipped this year.

Two months earlier, in March, Google shipped Ask Maps — a Gemini-powered conversational