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Comment by vzaliva | Hacker News Reader

I am a frequent traveller and stuck using TripIt. It has an antiquated UI and is not well-supported. That said, the killer feature they have is email parsing. Instead of filling the endless field of a form to enter my airline ticket or hotel reservation, I just forward their the confirmation email, and in most cases, they parse it. This is the feature you should consider adding.

Another comment I have is that the product description on the web page is sparse, so I was hesitant to sign up. Maybe there should be an "About" section?

A modern TripIt replacement is overdue and I will be glad to try alternatives.

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Wouldn’t ChatGPT and similar be a perfect use case for parsing those emails and outputting in whatever format you’d like?

Will ChatGPT input form data into websites? Your idea is good for "turn this ticket info into a .ics file" (I imagine) but might not work for "add this ticket info to this proprietary website's internal calendar".

I assume the point is not to have chatGPT actually perform the input.

Instead, it can be used to take various formats and output a common structured format that a program can then use to do the rest

Correct. From the user's point of view, forward the email confirmation and have it added to your itinerary. Internally, it could use ChatGPT or anything else to parse it and call the import API.

I tried this, but Bing Copilot hallucinated download links for the ICS files for me. When it was doing the gimmicky animated typing it was typing some Markdown-esque URL, but when it finished the line it ended up with just the link title with nothing clickable...

GPT? Probably not. But there are AI products out there that can be trained to do that kind of grunt work with text that has semi-regular features to it. Amazon Textract is one such tool.

Emails don't need OCR and are usually html with attachments, not structured pdfs.

If you want to process contracts or business letters... Then yes, that'd be a good choice.

You might want to give a shot to Stippl! It aims to simplify your travel (planning), and also has document forwarding. Doesn't yet do email parsing though.

Full disclosure: I'm one of the founders

After registering it attepts to open https://stippl.io via external URL handler which gives me a popup in my Firefox.

Looks good! I will try when you add email parsing feature :) It is a pain to input details manually but I like having all my information in once place when I travel: confirmation numbers, hotel addresses, phone numbers, etc.

On plus side, as someone suggested LLMs like ChatGPT should be a very good fit for email parsing and easy to integrate (e.g. ChatGPT API asking to output JSON).

Yep, definitely something that's on our wishlist!

I was just thinking this morning about email as the integration interchange, and how TripIt did the best job of this I've seen. It is really, really hard to do right but an awesome feature IMO. I wondered if this is because I'm old and like email though; my kids never use it.

Well, confirmations are essentially always emails. Your kids may not care about those but adults pretty much have to.

But yes I do generally like it even if a lot of chit chat, appointment reminders, and the like have migrated to messaging.

Yeah. There are things I don’t like about TripIt. It’s no use for planning and I wish it had the option of a calendar style output to make gaps and inconsistencies more obvious. The email feature that usually works is pretty killer though.

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