Can AI tell your travel story? We tried it. This is what we found

What if you just travelled and clicked photos, and someone else told your story on social media? A travel companion, if you will. Imagine not having to think up those numerous hashtags for your perfect selfie in that pool at Marina Bay Sands or that stunning sunset that you captured at Tanah Lot but could not think of an apt caption. What if someone thought all of that for you and let you concentrate on the main thing: travelling?

What sounds a little too good to be true is now reality. A travel bot called Kogo is telling your travel stories from the word Go. Once you activate Kogo, it pairs with your phone and stays on your trail till you unpair it. The device resembles a small box that you can easily carry with you. If you're travelling on the road, and Kogo is mainly targeted at road-trippers, bikers and travellers in general, you can either carry the device on your person or attach it to your vehicle. The package comes with a magnetic strip that is *very* hard to pry off once stuck, to ensure that it stays in place come hell or hailstorm.

Once you activate the bot and have downloaded the app, it's just the wait till you start your journey. The community, built along the lines of your more famous social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, shows you who is where, who is on a road trip, all real-time.

The Kogo device. Photo: Instagram/kogostories

The bot also tracks your location and if you're travelling in a pack, helps others on the team see where you are - even at places where your phone GPS would otherwise fail you.

We recently tried out Kogo on a road trip from Jodhpur to Khimsar in Rajasthan. We took off on a sunny afternoon in early February, our Kogos firmly attached to our vehicles or snug in our handbags. After that, it was an easy ride. Once we keyed in the 'from' and 'to', the app gave the travel story a title on its own. Ours said, "Felt like taking a 101-km trip to Rajasthan to ward off the midweek madness." There was a photo of Rajasthan already on the story, and hashtags said '#Jodhpur', '#Deoli'.

As you feed in more about yourself to the AI-powered bot, it learns what kind of captions and what kind of hashtags to throw at you. If you don't like them, there's always the option to edit them. On the way, if the bot detects a stop, it asks you if you stopped at the certain place; and what made you stop. There are a variety of options to choose from, from 'pee break' to 'clicked a photo'. Depending on your answer, the device constructs a sentence to go with it. So when we told the app that we stopped to click a photo, it came up with, "What a view stopped at (location)."

It also gives you a day-by-day speed summary and distance summary once your trip is over, including a route map detailing your stops, bends and curves on the road and everything else, pretty much. You can then share the story on to your social media accounts.

The route map on the app

But what if you don't want anyone to see your travel story on this app? The creators of the device, Raj K Gopalakrishnan and Praveer Kochhar tell us that you can choose to go 'private'. That way, your trip stays yours alone. There are two other options when you share your LIVE trip: Everyone and Followers. Depending on what you choose, people can see your trip.

Raj and Praveer, both bikers, rode to Jodhpur from Delhi before our interaction and told us why they chose to take the road over a flight: adrenaline, what else! And of course, to introduce us to the device LIVE.

One of the reasons this bot scores over your regular Google Maps is it helps the community members learn from someone else's route. Google will not really tell you if the pakoda at Nagori Cold Drinks is absolutely delightful or if a road off the main highway is the most scenic route to take while travelling to a certain place.

How much does it cost? The Kogo device comes for an introductory price of Rs 7,749, which includes a one-year subscription to the app.

Well, to be honest, we were a little concerned before taking off on this ride with a bot. Will AI take our jobs too? Thankfully, no. So while Kogo tells you the story in snippets, photos, captions and hashtags, we will still tell you the story in words.

(The writer tweets as @ananya116.)

ALSO READ: Stories from Travel and Aviation

ALSO READ | In the Russian Arctic: Seeing the Northern Lights from the End of the Earth

ALSO READ: World's most powerful passports ranking 2020 out. India is 84th on the list

ALSO WATCH: What happens when a single girl goes to Uzbekistan, the land of Taimur