Made in Mayo by AI: New app promises to help older people book public transport

HE doesn’t know how to write code. But he is curious and being open to new AI technologies has helped Alex Santos create an app that will make the lives of many people easier.

Its name: Passenger.ie. When Alex moved to Mayo, he started giving classes to teach seniors how to use smartphones, and also assisting people at home of any age with technology. He also helped out at the community centre near Westport, on how to use laptops.

INSPIRATION
“THE older generation, they do struggle, because a lot of things that we younger ones take for granted. We know how those things have evolved, but for the majority of them, they had a landline in the corner of a room for the vast majority of their life, maybe more than half their life.”

And then mobile phones came, but they didn’t want to pay much attention to it. And then in the last ten years, it just grew so much that people have become very reliant on it.

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“We need it for many kinds of services, so when people tell them, just go online and do this online, they just feel very nervous. In a similar way, as if we were learning how to do knitting.

Imagine you just needed to knit once a month, you wouldn’t remember if someone taught you how to knit.”

Alex says he tries to show them that if they are at least curious, and then leave the fear outside, and try that it can become something easier.

He made the experience that during the classes, people wanted to know how to book trains, planes, or bus tickets. So the train tickets were the ones that he used to teach the most. And Alex learnt that the process to book those tickets can be a struggle. Pop-up windows, cookies, Google search results, it can all be a bit overwhelming.

“So I felt, a solution could be to offer an alternative that would make it feel like a conversation with a friend, because if you know how to chat, text a friend on WhatsApp, or SMS, a normal text message, you will be able to use my app passenger.ie.”

It’s literally like a chat, the user gets asked where they wish to go from where to where, and the rest is taken care of. The app has an automation built in, that goes to the websites of the transport services. This takes away all the legwork, multiple clicks and possible pitfalls.

THE HELP OF AI
AS soon as Alex Santos had identified a need, he went about looking for ways to solve the problem. A designer by trade, he’s been very open to new AI technologies. There are tools out there, which make app development possible without knowing how to write code, like Python, for example.

“I believe, as we say in English, when there’s a will there’s a way. And now, the way is artificial intelligence which can help people like me who want to make something happen,” Alex says.

But make no mistake, using AI assistants is still hard work. Alex worked in the evenings, and he had to be patient. But eventually, he got there.

“I believe that if we go back and look at the news about, let’s say, when the electricity came out, when the internet came out, when the computer came out.

All those big revolutions created a massive amount of fear, because everybody feared what they didn’t know. People who didn’t want to use a computer, because they were just used to a typewriter.

Those people could see that, well, the typewriter still exists, and there are still people who loved it. But the computer helped, it was a tool to perform similar jobs as a typewriter, and even be much better at it. You don’t need the paper any more, you have a screen.”

Santos believes AI won’t be taking people’s jobs. Instead: “People who use AI might take your job. So it’s more about seeing this as a tool, rather than one day needing your kid to teach you how to use this AI in 2056.”

Santos likes the famous quote attributed to Steve Jobs: “Stay curious, stay foolish.”

Up until now, passenger.ie was aimed at people with a travel pass but an update is being released this week. It’ll include payment options for buying tickets without a travel pass.

Passenger.ie is currently available on the website and the AppStore. An Android version is planned to follow as well.

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