ixigo launches AI-native app with TARA assistant

Online travel platform ixigo unveiled a fully rebuilt, AI-native mobile app on May 13, 2026, with a multimodal AI travel assistant named TARA, per ETtech and AutocarPro. The redesign integrates conversational voice, text and tap interactions across the user interface rather than layering AI on top of legacy screens, AutocarPro reports. The launch was presented at ixigo NEXT, and ETtech published statements from founders Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar describing agent-led travel use cases.

AutocarPro describes TARA as supporting voice conversations in English, Hindi and Hinglish, with additional languages planned. The assistant can handle complex itinerary requests, provide contextual trip data such as gate details and weather, and run background "agentic travel flows" that perform tasks like sending boarding passes to WhatsApp and enabling Apple Wallet and Google Wallet integration, AutocarPro reports. ETtech notes that TARA originated as a chatbot in 2018 and that the company reports the assistant handled 3.81 million customer queries in Q3 FY26 versus 2.11 million in Q4 FY25, with 76% of voice calls end-to-end resolved by AI in Q3 (ETtech).

Editorial analysis: Companies building conversational, agentic features typically balance conversational UX gains against integration, permissioning and privacy trade-offs. Industry practitioners implementing similar background agents commonly need robust consent flows, audit trails, and retry semantics for external integrations such as wallets and messaging platforms.

The packaging of post-booking data into a single Trip Mode window follows a broader pattern in travel tech toward context-rich, task-focused surfaces. For product and ML teams, this pattern raises data engineering and real-time inference requirements, and increases the surface area for edge cases such as schedule changes and third-party API failures.

Observers should track adoption metrics, opt-in rates for agentic flows, latency and error rates on background tasks, and third-party integration reliability. Also watch regulatory and privacy responses around proactive agent actions and message-based boarding-pass delivery.

ETtech records Aloke Bajpai saying, "We believe the future of travel will be agent-led, with AI that can understand intent, take proactive actions and assist travellers seamlessly before, during, and after their trips." ETtech also quotes Rajnish Kumar describing the system handling about 150,000 end-to-end AI calls during a December disruption, with AI covering "90% of all calls" during that period.