Desti is a travel-mapping app that uses artificial intelligence and natural language to help you find everything you need on a trip. Everything like dining spots, attractions, activities and accommodations, it finds and saves them directly to your trip plan which can be accessed later while traveling. For example, type in “Where can I find a restaurant that serves great Italian food?” or “A pet friendly hotel”, the app will crawl the Web, gather information from a variety of sites, including TripAdvisor and Foursquare, and display them.
Nokia has recently acquired Desti and are hoping that it will beef up it’s HERE mapping platform. Since the terms of the deal were not disclosed, there’s no information on how much Nokia paid to acquire this company or how Desti will be incorporated into the HERE platform. Although, as part of the deal, the existing Desti app will be shut down. Nokia has also pulled the iOS app from the app store.
“The Desti technology will improve HERE’s ability to process language more easily with natural language search capabilities because its artificial intelligence and natural language processing technology has an understanding of places that is more natural to the way we speak about them,” Nokia told PCWorld. “Unlike traditional search engines, which index keywords, Discovery analyzes the context around the questions people are asking, looking for meaning and intent by creating a natural dialog with them.”
